Transmission of Digital Imagery
J. W. Percival, Vittorio Castelli · 2001
The transmission of digital imagery is usually handled through the exchange of raw, uncompressed files, losslessly compressed files, or files compressed with some degree of lossiness chosen in advance at the server. The files are first transmitted and then some visualization program is invoked on the received file. Another type of transmission, growing in popularity with archives of large digital images, is called progressive transmission. When an image is progressively transmitted from server to client, it can be displayed by the client as the data arrive, instead of having to wait until the transmission is complete. This allows browsing in an archive even over connections for which the transmission time of a single image may be prohibitive. In this chapter each of these transmission schemes and their effect on the allocation of resources between server, network, and client are discussed.