JPEG stands for
Joint Photographic Experts Group, the
organization that originally created the
standard. It is a
lossy compression scheme for
images which achieves reasonable results. The
algorithm achieves its
compression by using the
discrete cosine transform to
encode image information, then
rounding the
DCT coefficients.
This technique is likely to be rendered
obsolete by an algorithm like
JPEG-2000, which uses
wavelets.