1 Abstract
Images have been around since the beginning of time. As soon as we are born we open our eyes and
develop the ability to see everything around us. We seldom appreciate the amount of data it would
take to accurately reconstruct images of the quality we visualise thousands of times every minute of
every hour of every day.
This presents a problem for many modern day computers and imaging applications trying to
represent these images as accurately as possible. It is not yet common place to have devices in
every day life that can handle such huge amounts of data required for real world image
manipulation.
Computers, along with many other types of machinery, need to be able to handle images which
represent real world scenes. Over the years technology has advanced so this can be achieved
relatively easily using hardware purchased from high street shops. However, this technology would
not have been possible without the development of compression techniques and algorithms designed
to take largely detailed image files and compress them into usable images with virtually no demise
in quality.
The learning and understanding of the techniques employed to compress images has, traditionally,
caused problems for many students and learners alike. Image compression is a complicated subject
with many different file formats and compression algorithms to learn about.
The purpose of this project is to try to aid this learning process by providing a tutorial to assist
students grappling with image compression for the first time.
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2 Acknowledgements
There are many people I would like to thank for their help, guidance and support throughout the
duration of this project.
Firstly I would like to thank Dr Sandra Woolley for all the help, guidance and time she has given me
for this project. Also Professor Mike Sharples and all members of the Educational Technology Group
for testing my project and accommodating me in their research laboratory.
Special thanks to Javier Pinilla for the u