Image Transforms: DCT

It is well known that LTI operators may be implemented in the Fourier transform domain, leading to computational efficiencies. The energy compaction property of transforms such as the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), discrete cosine transform (DCT) or discrete wavelet transform (DWT) plays an important role in many image/video compression techniques. Here we demonstrate image compression using the DCT transform.

Here we take the block cosine transform of the head image. The blocks are non-overlapping, of dimensions 8x8.

Here we show a fragment of the head image and the DCT coefficients.

We now retain cosine coefficients located in a low-frequency zone of each block. We then use the inverse DCT to calculate an approximation to the original image. Here is a typical zonal mask.

The compression capabilities of the DCT are clearly visible.  Using only 23% of the image's total energy, the reconstructed image is a reasonable approximation of the original. The error signal is on the farthest right. The approximation is guaranteed to improve as the number of coefficients is increased.

Further reading

User's Guide: Sections 8.4, 8.7.

Function Index: BlockProcessing, DiscreteCosineTransform, InverseDiscreteCosineTransform, RawImageData.