Thanks to the researchers MIT the field of video and images could soon receive a major technological innovation: the new discovery would speed up the compression of images by applying an algorithm based on Fourier transform. The technique has been developed by researchers Dina Kataba and Piotr Indyki with students Eric Price and Haitham Hassanieh.

The Fourier transform is one of the most important functions of mathematics, and has found great application in computer science: for example, are used to represent the fluctuations of voltage in the wire that connects an MP3 player to a speaker, not to mention the wide use in electronic music and study of audio frequencies. But the two researchers have found a way to apply this function to the images. The technique consists of dividing the signs and trying frequencies scattered but present in each section of the signal: for there is no need to sample the whole image, but only part This technique allows to speed up the processing time up to ten times.

Destinations practices of this technology would, for example, in Smart phones, Allowing quickly send images and save battery power and bandwidth. In one image an 8 * 8 block of pixels is treated as a sample of 64 frequencies, but given that 57 of these frequencies can be ignored without losing image quality here is that the new technique works on a smaller number of signals.

The new algorithm developed at MIT, “greatly increases the number of circumstances in which you can beat the FFT”, i.e. the previous algorithm known as Fast Fourier Transform. While no immediate practical applications having been submitted, it is plausible to think that the field of mobile and Cloud could benefit from new technology to transmit data faster across the network.