‘eure ervoppenembndeateg 7.32 Source Coding Source coding takes into account the semantics of the information to be encoded [SGC90}. The degree of compression attainable with this often lossy technique depends ‘on the medium. Inthe case of lossy compression, a relation exists between the uncoded data and the decoded dat the data seams are similar but not identical. The character- istics of the medium can be exploited. Inthe case of speech, a considerable reduction of the amount of data ean be achieved by transforming the time-dependent signal into the frequency domain, followed by an encoding of the formants (see Chapter 3 regarding audio), Formants are defined as the maxima in the voice spectrum. Generally, five for smants along with the voice fundamental frequency suffice for a very good reconstruc- tion of the original signal, although formant tracking has been shawn to be a problem with this form of speech analysis (see Chapter 3). In the case of still images, spatial redundancies can be used for compression through a content prediction technique. Other techniques perform a transformation of the spatial domain into the two-dimensional frequency domain by using the cosine transform. Low frequencies define the average color, and the information of higher fre- ‘quencies contains the sharp edges. Hence, low frequencies are much more important than the higher Frequencies, a feature that can be used for compression. Table 7-1 shows only a sampling ofall coding and compression techniques, The ‘emphasis is on the algorithms that are most important or multimedia systems and on their properties. To better understand the hybrid schemes, we consider a set of typical processing steps common to all techniques (entropy, source, and hybrid). 7.3.3. Major Steps of Data Compression Figure 7-1 shows the typical soquence of operations performed in the compres- sion of still images and video and audio data streams. The following example describes the compression of one image: [L‘The preparation step (here picture preparation) generates an appropriate digital ‘representation of the information in the medium being compressed. For example, ‘a picture might be divided into blocks of 88 pixels with a fixed number of bits perpixel. 2. The processing step (here picture processing) isthe first step that makes use ofthe various compression algorithms, For example, a wansformation from the time domain to the frequency domain can be performed using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). In the case of interframe coding, motion vectors can be deter- ed here for each 8x8 pixel block. 3. Quantization takes place after the mathematically exact picture processing step. Values determined in the previous step cannot and should not be processed with