Explore how computer systems store, manipulate, and convert various data types like text, images, and videos through integrated software and hardware. Gain insights into accessible data representation.

Computer systems do not understand human instructions, nor can they perceive real-life data in its raw form. Therefore, computer systems require a way to store and represent information in an accessible way. They use software and hardware components combined to help retrieve information, store it, manipulate it, and convert it back to a human-accessible format. If you want to learn how computer systems perform complex tasks such as storing and manipulating textual data, videos, music, images of your cat, and much more, this course is meant for you.

Information Representation in Computer Systems

Lossy compressions allow a reduction in the size of a file by removing unnecessary or less important data. However, removing data can distort the original file and, therefore, lossy compressions are only used where a slight distortion to a file is tolerable because sometimes the loss in detail is barely noticeable by humans. The amount of data reduction possible using lossy compression is much higher than through the lossless techniques coming up in the next lesson.

In this lesson, you will get a brief introduction to lossy compression techniques.

Computer basics

Hardware and Software Components of a Computer

Data Representation in Python

Image, Audio, and Video Representation in Python

Data Compression

Lossy Compression

What is lossy compression?