Psychovisual image compression techniques are disclosed that compress pixel data by a fixed compression ratio with little or no perceptual loss of detail. In some implementations, a psychovisual compression process is selected among several psychovisual compression processes based on characteristics of the pixel data. Compression is achieved during encoding by discarding psychovisually unnecessary bits from the pixel data. The psychovisual compression processes can be implemented in hardware and operate on scan lines of pixels captured by the image sensor. The psychovisual compression techniques can be used with image compression techniques to compress further the pixel data.
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