If you’re an ardent photographer you've probably noticed the
option your camera offers of saving photographs in RAW format. That means
you’re using a format that retains the image in excruciating detail. Many
formats have been developed considering the sensitivity of human perception to
do away with excruciating detail that only go on to hog space in terms of MB
and GB on your memory strict. To reduce the cost of storing images in
electronic memory certain standards like
JPEG and MPEG were developed. JPEG, if you didn't know, is short for Joint
Photographic Experts Group and MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group.
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| Data Compression |
What compression essentially does is loses superfluous
information to trim the size of the file. How it does this through different
algorithms such as Lempel-Ziv, Huffman Coding and Discrete Cosine Transform to
spot the repetitive and unnecessary details. For example the photograph of the
sky would have hues of approximately the same shade. So the compression technique
spots the pixels with approximately the same information (colour) and flattens
this repetitive information by reducing the slight variations. This reduces the
cost of storing the images because it occupies less space and because the lack
of variations are not perceptible to the human eye the idea of compression is
quite clever.
