What's that deal with the DCT?

Discrete cosine transforms (DCTs) and discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) are reviewed in order to determine why DCTs are more popular for image compression than the easier-to-compute DFTs. DCT-based image compression takes advantage of the fact that most images do not have much energy in the high-frequency coefficients. It is suggested that DCTs are more popular because fewer DCT coefficients than DFT coefficients are needed to get a good approximation to a typical signal, since the higher-frequency coefficients are small in magnitude and can be more crudely quantized than the low-frequency coefficients.<<ETX>>