Abstract

Retrieving large data objects (of the order of hundreds of thousands of kilobytes) in a wide area network such as the Internet takes several seconds and occasionally minutes. As a step towards reducing response time we have studied the possibility of reducing the size of the data object by "losing" some of the data and then retrieving it. We have focussed on transmission of images across a wide area network. Images are amenable to losing data without losing the semantics of the image. Lossy compression techniques result in a smaller size, lower quality image. We have studied how the quality of the image can be sacrificed to achieve higher speed in retrieval over a wide area network. We have identified parameters involved in the retrieval process and conducted experiments to see how they can be varied to speed up retrieval. We have developed a scheme to reduce response time at the expense of the quality of the object depending on the current values of the parameters. 1 Introduction Dig...

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