Image Representation

Images are everywhere on computers. Some are obvious, like photos on web pages and icons on buttons, but others are more subtle: a font is really a collection of images of characters, and a fax machine is really a computer that is good at scanning and printing.

This activity explores how images as data structures are displayed, based on the pixel as a building block. In particular, the great quantity of data in an image means that we need to use compression to be able to store and transmit it efficiently. The compression method used in this activity is based on the one used in fax machines, for black and white images.