Evolution of the discrete cosine transform using genetic programming

Abstract

Compression of 2 dimensional data is important for the efficient transmission, storage and manipulation of Images. The most common technique used for lossy image compression relies on fast application of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). The cosine transform has been heavily researched and many efficient methods have been determined and successfully applied in practice; this paper presents a novel method for evolving a DCT algorithm using genetic programming. We show that it is possible to evolve a very close approximation to a 4 point transform. In theory, an 8 point transform could also be evolved using the same technique.