The Discrete Cosine Transform over Prime Finite Fields

This paper examines finite field trigonometry as a tool to construct trigonometric digital transforms. In particular, by using properties of the k-cosine function over GF(p), the Finite Field Discrete Cosine Transform (FFDCT) is introduced. The FFDCT pair in GF(p) is defined, having blocklengths that are divisors of (p+1)/2. A special case is the Mersenne FFDCT, defined when p is a Mersenne prime. In this instance blocklengths that are powers of two are possible and radix-2 fast algorithms can be used to compute the transform.