This document provides an overview of JPEG image compression. It discusses how digitized images require large amounts of memory and bandwidth. The JPEG standard was developed to address this by compressing images lossily. The main stages of JPEG compression are:
1. Dividing images into 8x8 pixel blocks and applying the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to each block.
2. Quantizing the DCT coefficients, discarding higher frequency coefficients below a threshold.
3. Entropy encoding the coefficients using techniques like run-length encoding and Huffman coding.
4. Assembling the encoded image into a JPEG bitstream with headers describing the encoding process.