Statistical distributions of image DCT coefficients

Abstract Several assumptions regarding the distributions of the DCT coefficients of image data have been made in recent years. A recent paper by Reininger and Gibson shows on the basis of distribution tests that the non-DC coefficients are best approximated by a Laplacian distribution. In this paper a similar test is used to show that while the distributions of the non-DC coefficients depend on the type of image, for most images, if a single distribution is desired for all the non-DC coefficients, a Cauchy distribution provides a better fit.