M. F. Barnsley, A. Sloan. A better way to compress images. BYTE Magazine, 1988.
The Natural World is filled with intricate detail. Consider the geometry on the back of your hand: the pores, the camera can capture that detail and, at your leisure, you can study the photo to see things you never noticed before. Can personalcomputers be made to carry out similar functions of image storage and analysis? If so, then image compression will certainly play a central role. The reason is that digitized images - images converted into bits for processing by a computer - demand large amounts of computer memory. For example, a high-detail gray-scale aerial photograph might be blown up to 3 1/2-foot square and then resolved to 300 by 300 pixels per square inch with 8 significant bits per pixel. Digitization at this level requires 130 megabytes of computer memory-too much for personal computers to handle. For real-world images such as the aerial photo, current compression techniques can achieve ratios of between 2 to 1 and 10 to 1. By these methods, our photo would still require between 65 and 13 megabytes.
@article{BaSl88,
Author = {Barnsley, M. F. and Sloan, A.},
Title = {A better way to compress images},
Journal = {BYTE Magazine},
Month = {},
Year = {1988}
}