JPEG-Based Image Compression

JPEG is a standardized image compression mechanism. It stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the original name of the committee that wrote the standard. JPEG is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale images of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic artwork, and similar material; not so well on lettering, simple cartoons, or line drawings. JPEG is a lossy compression algorithm, meaning that the decompressed image isnt quite the same as the one you started with. JPEG is designed to exploit known limitations of the human eye (more about this later), notably the fact that small color changes are perceived less accurately than small changes in brightness. A useful property of JPEG is that the degree of lossiness can be varied by adjusting compression parameters. This means that the image maker can trade off file size against output image quality. The code we have developed includes: Color space transformation between RGB and YCbCr, Quantization, Optimized encoding.