Video Compression: What is discrete cosine transform?

Question

I\'ve implemented an image/video transformation technique called discrete cosine transform. This technique is used in MPEG video encoding. I based my algorithm on the ideas pr

Answer 1

The result of a DCT is a transformation of the original source into the frequency domain. The top left entry stores the "amplitude" the "base" frequency and frequency increases both along the horizontal and vertical axes. The outcome of the DCT is usually a collection of amplitudes at the more usual lower frequencies (the top left quadrant) and less entries at the higher frequencies. As lassevk mentioned, it is usual to just zero out these higher frequencies as they typically constitute very minor parts of the source. However, this does result in loss of information. To complete the compression it is usual to use a lossless compression over the DCT'd source. This is where the compression comes in as all those runs of zeros get packed down to almost nothing.

One possible advantage of using the DCT to find similar regions is that you can do a first pass match on low frequency values (top-left corner). This reduces the number of values you need to match against. If you find matches of low frequency values, you can increase into comparing the higher frequencies.

Hope this helps