As is discussed in the first reading, many areas of computer science can and must be applied. A whole new set of jargon has emerged, relating to storage units, compression techniques, networking approaches, and special computer systems.
Of crucial importance is compression. When images are compressed, say by using the new JPEG standard (see 2nd article), approximately 20:1 savings in space is realized. This allows images to be handled on current computers, and large image collections to be managed using CD-ROMs or network servers. JPEG makes use of the discrete cosine transform (DCT), Huffman or arithmetic coding, and some other special tricks that altogether can be handled by special chips or fast host processors.
Standards for video (e.g., MPEG and px64) build upon the JPEG techniques, adding in other methods to remove temporal redundancy (i.e., repetition from one frame of data to the next).