Image compression

Lossless compression is preferred for archival purposes and often for medical imaging, technical drawings, clip art, or comics.

Lossy methods are especially suitable for natural images such as photographs in applications where minor (sometimes imperceptible) loss of fidelity is acceptable to achieve a substantial reduction in bit rate.

Despite its contrary nature, scalability also may be found in lossless codecs, usually in form of coarse-to-fine pixel scans.

Scalability is especially useful for previewing images while downloading them (e.g., in a web browser) or for providing variable quality access to e.g., databases.

[15] Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) is a lossless compression algorithm developed by Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv and Terry Welch in 1984.

[16] DEFLATE, a lossless compression algorithm developed by Phil Katz and specified in 1996, is used in the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.

As compression technologies advance, these methods continue to play a crucial role in various fields, including web development, digital media, and content management.

Huffman coding is a fundamental technique used in image compression algorithms to achieve efficient data representation.

Named after its inventor David A. Huffman, this method is widely employed in various image compression standards such as JPEG and PNG.