The whole reason this analogy breaks down is that letters are independent symbols while levels in an image represent a continuum. There's no mathematical corres

The whole reason this analogy breaks down is that letters are independent symbols while levels in an image represent a continuum. There's no mathematical correspondence among letters to exploit, only an accident of encoding. Apples to oranges. That said here's a particular rant transformed as a whole signal with the DCT and quantized a bit http://pastebin.com/B5zS8W8f http://pastebin.com/B5zS8W8f