Lesson 1.3 Lossy Compression Algorithms

In this lesson we’ll talk about lossy compression algorithms, and how it yields a much higher compression ratio than lossless compression with the goal of maximizing the compression ratio and minimizing distortion. Lossy compression algorithms make use of different distortion measures such as the Mean Square Error or the Peak-Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (PSNR) to describe the quality of the video signal. These measures provide a coarse reference to the perceived quality by the user. Compressing a video this way involves multiple steps to reduce the amount of transmitted data while maximizing the fidelity to the original signal.