Saturday, 17 September 2016

Codecs for Images

What is Codecs?
  • The Codecs stands for "Code/Decode" and "Compressor/Decompressor".
  • Codec is program that compresses data to enable faster transmission and decompresses received data.
  • Codecs are compression technologies and have two components, an encoder to compress the files, and a decoder to decompress. 
  • There are codecs for data (PKZIP), still images (JPEG, GIF, PNG), audio (MP3, AAC) and video (Cinepak, MPEG-2, H.264, VP8).

Need of Codecs:
  • Codec is a physical piece of hardware responsible for turning analog video or audio into a digital format and vice-versa.It is also used in image conversions.
  • Without Codecs, downloads would be take three to five times longer than they do now.
  • The video and music files area large they difficult to transfer across the internet quickly. So, Codecs are needed to process quickly.

Codecs for Images:
  • The Image Codecs is method of compression  or decompression of a image file or image data.
  • The various Image codecs are technically differentiated from each other based on various factors which includes compression technology / algorithm, platform supported, sampling, OS supported etc.
There are various kinds of image Codecs are:
  • BMP
  • GIF
  • JPEG
  • JPEG 2000
  • MJPEG
  • PNG
  • WBMP
  • TIFF etc.

BMP GIF JPEG JPEG 2000 PNG
Stands for Bitmap Graphics Interchange Format Joint Photographic Experts Group Joint Photographic Experts Group 2000 (It is created in 2000 year)
Portable Network Graphics
File Extension .bmp .gif,.gfa .jpg,.jpeg,.jpe .jp2, .j2k .png
Quality Good Good Good Excellent Better
Suits for Images Animation Photographs Photographs Line Arts
Animation No Yes No No No
Compression Type Lossless Compression Lossless Compression Lossy Compression Lossy/Lossless Compression Lossless Compression

JPEG 2000 encoding and decoding process cycle:



Examples for Codecs for Images: