Question

I’m working on a project, a client-server application named ‘remote desktop control’. What I need to do is take a screen capture of the client computer and send this screen capture to the server computer. I would probably need to send 3 to 5 images per second. But considering that sending BufferedImage directly will be too costly for the process, I need to reduce the size of the images. The image quality need not to be loss less.

How can I reduce the byte size of the image? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can compress it with ZIP very easily by using GZIPInputStream and its output counterpart on the other end of the socket.

Edit:

Also note that you can create delta images for transmission, you can use a “transpartent color” for example (magic pink #FF00FF) to indicate that no change was made on that part of the screen. On the other side you can draw the new image over the last one ignoring these magic pixels.

Note that if the picture already contains this color you can change the real pink pixels to #FF00FE for example. This is unnoticable.

An other option is to transmit a 1-bit mask with every image (after painting the no-change pixels to an arbitrary color. For this you can change the color which is mostly used in the picture to result in the best compression ratio (optimal huffman-coding).