Project Description

This project is a lossy, content-aware image compression algorithm. Although it is a lossy compression algorithm, it is designed so that high compression ratios could be achieved without compromising with the properties of the original image.
The algorithm first assigns a significance value to every pixel in an image based on its neighboring pixels and then finds paths of least significant pixels through the image to be absolutely eliminated. As a result, the thickness of the image is compressed by a width of a pixel upon every iteration of the algorithm.
I was inspired to develop this algorithm during a sand art workshop where I saw that blowing off relatively less significant sand grains from a screen rendered the work of art totally intact. The algorithm has been implemented through dynamic programming.