Variable-size pruned discrete cosine transform routine for video compression

Digital video signals require large amounts of data to represent them. Much of the data is redundant, both spatially and temporally. Many ideas for eliminating that redundancy and hence conveying a given amount of information with less data have been proposed. Recently, the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) has released a standard for video compression which relies heavily on the computation-intensive methods of block-based transforms, such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), and motion estimation. An alternative transform, the pruned DCT (PDCT), is introduced and compared to the DCT in terms of computational expense and resulting image quality. Advantages and disadvantages of the PDCT in terms of computational savings and image quality, are presented