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FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

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Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#61

Post by kutkloon7 »

onion2k wrote: post #57
kutkloon7 wrote: post #53

Pretty amazing! Particularly nice is that an alpha channel and animation are also possible. One critical sidenode: it seems FLIF is still not as good as JPEG when used as lossy compression (this is something the benchmarks do not show well). For example, go to http://uprootlabs.github.io/poly-flif/ , choose the monkey image, choose 'comparing with same size JPG', and set truncation to 60% or more. Also, I'm not sure…

In the example you suggest using the hairs on the left side of the monkey's face have some significant artifacts. The quality of the jpeg is about the same as the FLIF file with a truncation of 80%, at which point the filesize is less than half the size of jpeg at 60%. If the image quality of the 60% truncated jpeg is acceptable then you can get the same quality but half the size using FLIF at 80%.

I don't understand your argument. The images are the same size. A 235KB jpeg of the monkey is almost indistinguishable from lossless, while in a 470KB flif, there are already unacceptable artifacts.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#63

Post by wmu »

Looks amazing! Really impressive results. Very cool that progressive loading is composed into the format.

However I am afraid that without support from biggest companies the format will never gain popularity. Just think how long it took to make PNG a web standard. And animated PNGs? Died unnoticed. To make things worse, GIF, a stinking leftover from '90, is still in use (even on HN!).

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#64

Post by IshKebab »

onion2k wrote: post #57
kutkloon7 wrote: post #53

Pretty amazing! Particularly nice is that an alpha channel and animation are also possible. One critical sidenode: it seems FLIF is still not as good as JPEG when used as lossy compression (this is something the benchmarks do not show well). For example, go to http://uprootlabs.github.io/poly-flif/ , choose the monkey image, choose 'comparing with same size JPG', and set truncation to 60% or more. Also, I'm not sure…

In the example you suggest using the hairs on the left side of the monkey's face have some significant artifacts. The quality of the jpeg is about the same as the FLIF file with a truncation of 80%, at which point the filesize is less than half the size of jpeg at 60%. If the image quality of the 60% truncated jpeg is acceptable then you can get the same quality but half the size using FLIF at 80%.

Not sure what you're trying to say exactly, but at the same file size ('Compare with same size JPEG' + 60% truncation), FLIF is obviously far worse than JPEG.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#65

Post by JonnieCache »

dspillett wrote: post #52
AshleysBrain wrote: post #5

If browsers supported APIs to allow "native" image/video/audio codecs to be written in JS, we could support new formats like this without needing any co-operation from the (very conservative) browser vendors. I wrote a proposal for this here: https://discourse.wicg.io/t/custom-image-audio-video-codec-a...

As a hacky workaround you can have the JS decompressor replace img tags with a canvas and draw on that, or create a data or blob URI and apply that to the img tag (I'm not sure which would be least efficient). I assume that is how https://uprootlabs.github.io/poly-flif/ is adding support. I might have to have a browse around that project's code when I have some free time. I doubt it would be practical for production…

That's how the BPG demo worked.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#66

Post by eddieh »

jaredcheeda wrote: post #48
eddieh wrote: post #28

Honest question. Seriously not trying to dismiss the work. Why not TIFF? 30 years old, already built into nearly every graphics application, supports everything this proposes and more. Plus it is already supported in Safari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_Image_File_Format

Well TIFF has very poor compression leading to large file sizes compared even to PNG. And thus no one uses it on the web. FLIF has very good compression, it will only download the minimum amount of data required to display the image at it's current resolution. It supports 32-Bit images/animations/transparency. It does animation playback in realtime while it's downloading the file. So as it plays the resolution just i…

TIFF can do tiled images too and there is nothing stopping someone from adding a TIFF extension for better compression or anything else imaginable.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#67

Post by Zardoz84 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #47
Zardoz84 wrote: post #25

16 bit per channel and on future support for CMYK. Looks like a interesting alternative to TIFF for digital preservation. Sadly, the actual recommended format is TIFF (so, waste of storage space) -> http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/stillimg.html

> (so, waste of storage space) To be fair, given the speed at which storage space has grown over the years, it's not really something to worry about in the context of archiving material for future generations (which is very different than being able to quickly download something on the internet now , for example)

Well, when you do service archiving material to the web, the storage cost isn't irrelevant Also, big files means more network traffic between our webservers and the storage servers. Plus this format have other interesting features, like tiled rendering or the progressive download. Sadly, we must handle huge TIFFs and generate jpeg miniatures and tilesets from it, if not serving it online would be very painful.

Note: I work on a company dedicated to archiving of libraries, museums and archives...

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#68

Post by dave2000 »

teh_klev wrote: post #46

Do any of these newer/experimental schemes, such as this one, take into account other factors such as CPU load before declaring themselves as "better". For example this project seems pretty cool, but there's no data on how CPU bound, memory bound, I/O bound its decompression algorithm is. I guess what I'm asking is, if I hit a web page with 20 images @ 100k per image is it going to nail one or more cores at 100% and…

It says very clearly a number of times that it's better in terms of compression ratio.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#69

Post by tambourine_man »

Houshalter wrote: post #56
matzipan wrote: post #8

Does anybody understand how lossless JPEG works? To my mind, the whole point of JPEG is to get rid of high-frequency components.

This isn't how it actually works, but one way to turn a lossy decoder into a lossy one, is to send a diff of the actual pixels vs the encoded ones. Since the lossy compression will be close to correct, the diff will mostly be small values or 0's. Which is much easier to compress. Likewise you can turn any lossless compressor into a lossy one, by modifying the pixels that are the hardest to compress. E.g. if there is…

Kind of. Have you tried running a PNG compressor on a JPEG file?

It is smaler than a straight to PNG file but nowhere near the size of the original JPG.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#70

Post by pixl97 »

techdragon wrote: post #38
Zardoz84 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because isn't open source, and is a proprietary format from Adobe ?

While not Open Source TIFF has age advantages in that close to anything related to it is unencumbered by patents, or will soon cease to be if any do remain. Also TIFF is an open container like MKV and can be used for far more than just simple pictures.

>Also TIFF is an open container like MKV and can be used for far more than just simple pictures.

I see this commonly in different business and medical applications where information may need to be accessible for years or decades after creation. There is a pretty even mix of TIFF and PDF/A in these environments and because of the legal liabilities I don't see them being displaced.

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