Image compression is used to minimize the amount of memory needed to represent an image.
Images often require a large number of bits to represent them, and if the image needs to be transmitted or stored, it is impractical to do so without somehow reducing the number of bits. The problem of transmitting or storing an image affects all of us daily. TV and fax machines are both examples of image transimission, and digital video players and web pictures of Catherine Zeta-Jones are examples of image storage. Three techniques of image compression that we have discussed in lecture are pixel coding, predictive coding, and transform coding. The idea behind pixel coding, is to encode each pixel independently.