COMP 150-01 Multimedia Data Compression

Data compression plays a much larger part in your life than you probably realize. Every time you view a GIF image you are running an LZW algorithm, while viewing JPEGs requires Discrete Cosine Transforms and Huffman coding. Few people realize that MP3 stands for MPEG-2 Audio Layer III; even fewer are aware that it is based on sub band coding with adaptive quantization. This course will start with the basics of information theory and lossless compression, building up to an appreciation of the components of modern video standards such as MPEG-4. Proficiency in C or C++ (including shift and logical operations) is assumed, along with a willingness to learn the techniques from linear algebra and probability that will be introduced in this course.