The Discrete Cosine Transform expresses a sequence of finitely many data points in terms of a sum of cosine functions oscillating at different frequencies.
DCTs are important to numerous applications in science and engineering, from lossy compression of audio (e.g. MP3) and images (e.g. JPEG) (where small high-frequency components can be discarded), to spectral methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations. The use of cosine rather than sine functions is critical in these applications: for compression, it turns out that cosine functions are much more efficient (as described below, fewer are needed to approximate a typical signal), whereas for differential equations the cosines express a particular choice of boundary conditions.
Source: wikipedia
