What you've described is basically what JPEG does using DCT (JPEG-1) or wavelet coefficients (JPEG 2000) as the basis. The advantage with JPEG is that the forward transform is very easy.
You can use whatever basis you want, but I wouldn't call it ideal in any practical sense if you have to run a GA for a several hours to encode an image.
Comments
What you've described is basically what JPEG does using DCT (JPEG-1) or wavelet coefficients (JPEG 2000) as the basis. The advantage with JPEG is that the forward transform is very easy.
You can use whatever basis you want, but I wouldn't call it ideal in any practical sense if you have to run a GA for a several hours to encode an image.