Image formats: Pixel data from encoders to decoders
From individual pixels to fully decoded images on your screen, raw pixel data gets transformed, compressed, and efficiently delivered. Learn about the techniques and optimizations that shrink image information without any perceivable loss in quality.
In the previous post , we focused on how images are seen by people and shown on devices. Now it's time to zoom in and explore the tiny building blocks of an image — the pixels and the bytes behind them. What is an image pixel? To display an image, a device needs to get information about the colors of different parts of the image from a data source. For a device, most images are just grids, and each cell in that grid is a pixel. A pixel is an ephemeral value; it doesn't have a size or shape. It's up to the hardware and software to decide how to represent these pixels. There are an infinite numb
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