NASA Ames has developed DCTune, a computer technology that significantly improves efficiencies in storage and transmission of documents, pictures and videos. Benefits Control over desired picture quality. Control over desired compression efficiency. Optimum compression at given picture quality. The DCTune technology represents a fundamental improvement on existing optimization techniques known as Quantization.
Quantization selectively increases or decreases the amount of information used to render a picture.
This selective allocation is based on the anticipated sensitivity of the human eye to the target portion of the image. If the eye is sensitive to the targeted portion then more picture information will be used. Previous techniques took an averaging approach to determine the eye's sensitivity toward brightness and contrast. This leads to over allocation of information in portions of the image where the eye is not as sensitive as represented. However in the DCTune technology the sensitivity behavior of the human eye is accurately modeled and it is thus able to precisely determine the amount of information needed for each image.