How to do image compression before the era of deep learning

The singular-value decomposition (SVD) algorithm has been for decades one of the standard ways of compressing images. The lectures on the SVD give many of the essential details concerning the SVD.

The orthogonal vectors which are obtained from the SVD, can be used to project down the dimensionality of a given image. In the example here we gray-scale an image and downsize it.

This recipe relies on us being able to actually perform the SVD. For large images, and in particular with many images to reconstruct, using the SVD may quickly become an overwhelming task. With the advent of efficient deep learning methods like CNNs and later generative methods, these methods have become in the last years the premier way of performing image analysis. In particular for classification problems with labelled images.