Current standards for the compression of still and moving images use Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to remove spatial redundancy in images. Students specialising in image and video system engineering need to know why DCT is important in their field of interest and to understand the influence of DCT-based image compression on picture quality. Therefore, we have developed educational software, called DCTlab, that helps students to analyse DCT application in still image compression systems. This paper describes software characteristics, its application in a digital television course and learning outcomes.
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