DCT

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:40 am
Short for Discrete Cosine Transform, a technique for representing waveform data as a weighted sum of cosines. DCT is commonly used for data compression, as in JPEG. This usage of DCT results in lossy compression. DCT itself does not lose data; rather, data compression technologies that rely on DCT approximate some of the coefficients to reduce the amount of data.