This section introduces some of the most common graphics and image file formats. Some of them are restricted to particular hardware/operating system platforms, others are cross-platform independent formats. While not all formats are cross-platform, there are conversion applications that will recognize and translate formats from other systems.
The document (http://www.cica.indiana.edu/graphics/image.formats.html) by CICA at Indiana Univ. provides a fairly comprehensive listing of various formats.
Most image formats incorporate some variation of a compression technique due to the large storage size of image files. Compression techniques can be classified into either lossless or lossy. We will study various video and audio compression techniques in the Next Chapter.