Fast computation of DCT by statistic adapted look-up tables

A fast algorithm to compute the discrete cosine transform (DCT) for video compression is presented. We replace the multiplications, which are the most time-consuming steps, by look-up table accesses. The problem of very long and memory-consuming tables is solved by reducing the tables to significant parts. This technique can be applied to other transformations, such as FFT or wavelets. The algorithm described computes 24% faster than Wang´s (1995) DCT on a Pentium processor.