The art of lossy compression consists almost entirely in choosing a representation for your data in which you can easily figure out what data to destroy. That is, if you’re compressing sound, you must transform the waveform into a domain where you can apply a psychoacoustic model that will guide decimation, that is, the deletion of part of the information, part of the information that won’t be heard missing. If you’re rather compressing images—that will be our topic today—you must have a good psychovisual model that will help you choose what information to destroy in your image
The model can be very sophisticated—and therefore computationally expensive—or merely a good approximation of what’s going on in the observers’ eyes (and mind).
But let’s start with the beginning: representing color