Image and Video Compression Fundamentals

Now that we have the basics of entropy, predictive coding, DCT, and quantization, we are ready to discuss image compression. Image compression, in contrast to video compression, deals with a still image, rather than a continuous sequence of images, which makes up a video stream. Following that, the basics of video compression are discussed. Video is made up of a stream of images, which can have high degrees of correlation that can be exploited to reduce the amount of data needed to transmit the video stream. Both image and video compression are lossy processes, which mean that information is permanently lost in the compression process.