GoKawiilSeptember 9, 2017
About 11 minutes
Visualization Images Compression JPEG STEM
How JPEG works
Interactively explore JPEG’s lossy compression methods
Introduction
In the world of technology, “forever” means about 5 years. It’s humbling to think that the 1992 JPEG image standard is still going strong despite being more than 5 “forevers” old. Why has it been so successful? This article presents the key ideas behind JPEG in plain language and includes an interactive JPEG compressor right on the page so you can play along at home.
Compression methods
Compression techniques look for repeated patterns in the data and then replace those patterns with shorter ones. It’s like using an abbreviation or acronym to stand in for a longer word or phrase. Video, still images, and audio don’t usually compress well. The problem with images and sound is that this data is usually too noisy to find good abbreviations. For this reason, JPEG and many other media formats use something called lossy compression.
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