Compressed Image File Formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, XBM, BMP

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About Compressed Image File

Product Description A comprehensive reference on the major graphics file formats and the compression technologies, this work is a useful resource for graphics programmers, especially those developing graphical applications for the Web. It examines the most common graphics file formats in detail and demonstrates how to encode and decode image files for each. Amazon.com Review Compressed Image File Formats is an appealingly compact and useful guide to some of today's most popular file formats used for image data. For any programmer who needs to know how images are stored, this concise reference can serve as a really invaluable resource. Besides full coverage of the popular BMP, GIF, and PNG file formats, the book zeroes in on the JPEG standard, perhaps today's most popular (and most complicated) image format. In a series of short chapters, the book looks at JPEG in detail, from basic file organization (its format and marker fields), file compression techniques (like Huffman coding and DCT), and how to decode (read) and encode (write) JPEG images. By condensing hundreds of pages of specifications and documentation from the voluminous JPEG standard into this short volume, the author has created a worthwhile summary of key JPEG features and compression techniques useful to any graphics programmer. The book also includes C++ code for a simple JPEG encoder (on the accompanying CD-ROM). This example can get you started compressing images using the JPEG format. In addition, the book discusses techniques for creating and decoding progressive JPEGs (used for downloading images in stages, in progressively finer resolutions, over the Internet). Whether you are a programmer faced with decoding or encoding image data, or an interested Webmaster who wants to know the pros and cons of today's image file formats, Compressed Image File Formats provides a worthwhile and concise reference to what's inside image files. --Richard Dragan Topics covered: bitmap basics, color models, Windows BMP file format, XBM file format, JPEG basics and file format, JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF), JPEG Huffman Coding, data unit encoding, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), matrix operations, JPEG decoding and encoding, progressive JPEG, GIF file format and compression, and PNG file format. From the Inside Flap The purpose of this book is to instruct the reader on how to write software that can read and write files using various 2-D image formats. I wanted to write a book that explains the most frequently used file formats with enough depth for the reader to implement them, as opposed to one that covered many different formats at a high level or one that avoided the more difficult image formats. As a result, I chose to cover the image file formats that are associated with Web browsers. Those covered in this book (BMP, XBM, JPEG, GIF, and PNG) represent the vast majority of image files that can be found on the Internet. They employ a wide range of encoding techniques and range in implementation difficulty from simple to very complex. The inspiration for this book was my own frustration resulting from the lack of information on how to implement encoders and decoders for the more complex file formats. Most of the information available was at too high a level, left major gaps, or was very difficult to decipher. I have tried to create a bridge between the programmer and the standards documents. One issue I faced at the start of this project was which programming language to use for the examples. The intention was to create a book on graphics file formats rather than one on how to write programs to read and write graphics files in a particular language. Therefore, I debated using a language that is easy to read (e.g., Pascal or Ada) or the one most people are likely to use (C++). In the end I felt that its widespread use made C++ the best choice. To make the examples more understandable for non-C++ programmers, I have carefully avoided certain C++ la