Image Compression: The Purpose Of Image Compression

958 Words2 Pages

The purpose of image compression is to represent images with less data in order to save storage costs or transmission time. Without compression, file size is significantly larger, usually several megabytes, but with compression it is possible to reduce file size to 10 percent from the original without noticeable loss in quality. Image compression can be lossless or lossy. Lossless compression means that you are able to reconstruct the exact original data from the compressed data. Image quality is not reduced when using lossless compression. Unlike lossless compression, lossy compression reduces image quality. You can't get the original image back after using lossy compression methods. You will lose some information. [1] Lossless image compression …show more content…

So it reduces the file size without degrading the visual quality. But GIF allows only to use 256 colors so it is not suitable for natural photographs which consist from millions of colors. However, quality can be enhanced by using color dithering. GIF is especially good for artificial images that contain sharp-edged lines and few colors. The compression algorithm that GIF uses was patented in 1985 and the controversy over the patent licensing led to development of the PNG image format. PNG uses also a lossless compression called DEFLATE that uses a combination of the LZ77 dictionary coder and Huffman coding. PNG offers better compression and more features than GIF but it doesn't support animation that GIF does. PNG allows to use millions of colors in pictures. [14-18] TIFF format is a flexible and adaptable file format. It can store multiple images in a single file. You can choose which compression algorithm to use. TIFF can be used as a container for JPEG or you can choose to use lossless compression such as RLE or LZW. Because TIFF supports multiple images in a single file, multi-page documents can be saved as single TIFF file rather than as a series of files for each scanned page.

More about Image Compression: The Purpose Of Image Compression

Open Document