Overview of audio/video/images in Java

There are a large number of formats used to represent images, videos, and audio. This type of data is typically stored in binary format. Analog audio streams are sampled and digitized. Images are often simply collections of bits representing the color of a pixel. The following are links that provide a more in-depth discussion of some of these formats:

• Audio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_file_format
• Images:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_file_formats
• Video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_file_format

Frequently, this type of data can be quite large and must be compressed. When data is compressed two approaches are used. The first is a lossless compression, where less space is used and there is no loss of information. The second is lossy, where information is lost. Losing information is not always a bad thing as sometimes the loss is not noticeable to humans.

As we will demonstrate in Chapter 3, Data Cleaning, this type of data often is compromised in an inconvenient fashion and may need to be cleaned. For example, there may be background noise in an audio recording or an image may need to be smoothed before it can be processed. Image smoothing is demonstrated in Chapter 3, Data Cleaning, using the OpenCV library.