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BPG Image format

bellard.org

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Re: BPG Image format

#81

Post by tachyonbeam »

ChrisGranger wrote: post #55
bane wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.verrando.com/pulcini/gp-uw1.html They have a 6-minute figure on their page. I wonder what modern hardware could do with it? Anybody care to give it a whirl?

I wonder how much that figure would drop if one could optimize the process for modern CPUs...

Even without optimizations. That page is from 1997. They probably ran this on a 200MHz machine at best. Modern CPUs are 30-50x faster just in terms of instructions per second. Then once you factor in multiple cores, we have desktop machines that are easily 100x faster.

In terms of optimizations we have SIMD and GPGPUs to make it even faster. Not unrealistic to think we could bring that 6 minute figure down to one second... And then, of course, there might be algorithmic tweaks that help us even more. Get 100 people looking at that code, and for sure they'd find ways to speed it up.

Re: BPG Image format

#82

Post by slig »

ChrisGranger wrote: post #31
aidenn0 wrote: post #24

How many "better JPEGs" have been created now, without significantly displacing JPEG's market share?

Indeed. Without out-of-the-box support in the major image editors like Photoshop and all the popular web browsers, I don't think we'll see JPEG overtaken any time soon.

If Chrome and Firefox implements this, then mod_pagespeed, for instance, can do the conversion on-the-fly also, services like CloudFlare can also do the conversion automatically.

Re: BPG Image format

#83

Post by hokkos »

malandrew wrote: post #29
loudmax wrote: post #19

I appreciate the historical tradition of using the photo of beautiful young Lena Söderberg as a test image, but it's time to move on. It's fun for us hetero males, but like it or not, this sends a message to young women that they aren't welcome in this field. I wish Fabrice Bellard would have left them out of the demo set. Having said that, all those demo photos do look good. I was wondering how we were going to see…

What about introducing a new male equivalent image of Lena instead? This approach would at least balance things out while maintaining an image that has become a standard to compare things to for a long time. If I were someone working on image compression techniques I would probably have seen many many algorithms and their output using that image so when I see a new algorithm and a new Lena, I might look at the result…

>A 2012 paper on compressed sensing by Deanna Needell and Rachel Ward used a photo of the model Fabio Lanzoni as a test image to draw attention to this issue

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Controversy

Re: BPG Image format

#84

Post by TD-Linux »

vmarsy wrote: post #74

Impressive! Right now it requires a .js decoder, of 75kb. Assuming a fast C++ decoder instead,(possibly GPU accelerated if the decoding algorithm is well suited for it) and not using JS but what would be the rendering times? PNG are 4x bigger in his experiments, but interlaced PNG makes it more pleasant to users since it can be rendered progressively, can BPG benefit from such a thing? edit: Interlacing is also used…

Progressive rendering of HEVC is not possible in the same way as it is done for JPEG or PNG. It is also not very suited to GPU rendering.

A C++ decoder with assembly optimizations could easily run four times as fast as the Javascript version. Unfortunately distributing it would not be possible due to patents.

Re: BPG Image format

#85

Post by geofft »

ANTSANTS wrote: post #77
loudmax wrote: post #19

I appreciate the historical tradition of using the photo of beautiful young Lena Söderberg as a test image, but it's time to move on. It's fun for us hetero males, but like it or not, this sends a message to young women that they aren't welcome in this field. I wish Fabrice Bellard would have left them out of the demo set. Having said that, all those demo photos do look good. I was wondering how we were going to see…

I think people that pretend to be offended by things like this, unwittingly infantilizing the people that they are trying to support, do far more to discourage minorities from tech than pictures of women's faces.

I'm curious if you're basing this belief on actual information from the people in question, or just your intuition about what they probably think.

Dianne O'Leary, distinguished university professor emerita in UMD's CS department, objects to it: https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/oleary/faculty/node8.html

Sunny Bains, senior teaching fellow at UCL, also objects (see page 6): http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/pcs_mirror/may_june01.p...

Re: BPG Image format

#87

Post by ANTSANTS »

geofft wrote: post #56
DanBC wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you find a set of great test images (under suitable licence) then run those through the wide variety of image formats at different settings, and host it all on a website? (Put a few ads on it and you have nearly passive income, if the hosting isn't too much)

Did you read the article? There were _several_ great test images used in the Mozilla study under suitable licenses, and Bellard did test with some of those. The Lena picture here wasn't particularly scientifically useful, it was presumably just used out of a sense of tradition. (Mozilla didn't use it.) http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...

What do you know, there are other attractive women in those photosets, including at least one that appears to be wearing roughly as little as Lena. It's almost like our brains are wired for facial recognition and thus attractive faces are good test subjects for image compression algorithms or something.

Re: BPG Image format

#88

Post by solarexplorer »

TD-Linux wrote: post #71
anigbrowl wrote: post #14

EDIT: I didn't expect this comment to be so popular and feel like I've hijacked the thread a little - sorry. Feel free to continue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706850 I would much rather someone revived the Fractal Image format, which is now out of patent. It's very expensive to encode, but that's nowhere near as big a problem as it used to be. It's very fast to decode, very small, and the files are resol…

The following paper explains many of the reasons that engineers lost interest in fractal image compression: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=660992... Unfortunately I can't find a free PDF at the moment.

PDF on CiteSeer: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.41....

Re: BPG Image format

#89

Post by higherpurpose »

mark-r wrote: post #18

I was ready to pass by this post with a yawn until I saw where it was coming from: Fabrice Bellard. He's no doubt an absolute freakin' genius. And if anybody knows about image conversion, it's him. Even the things he does just for fun are impressive. Have you ever booted up Linux inside your browser? http://bellard.org/jslinux/

He should be working on Daala next (for both video and image formats). Let's make the next media formats for the web truly open source.

> Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard.

So BPG is patent-encumbered, right?

Re: BPG Image format

#90

Post by anigbrowl »

jerf wrote: post #65
anigbrowl wrote: post #14

EDIT: I didn't expect this comment to be so popular and feel like I've hijacked the thread a little - sorry. Feel free to continue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706850 I would much rather someone revived the Fractal Image format, which is now out of patent. It's very expensive to encode, but that's nowhere near as big a problem as it used to be. It's very fast to decode, very small, and the files are resol…

I'd like to see a modern implementation and some unbiased testing done before I got too excited. From what I could tell, the tech got more hype than was justified by its ability to perform, and I suspect the fact that it still isn't in much use may have more to do with difficult being better at anything in particular than a current existing solution rather than a lack of people interested in it. (And note my phrasing…

IT's not the most competitive in compression or speed terms as far as I know, but the resolution independence is a Big Deal to me. I first saw this technology about 20 years ago and I am still impressed by it because nothing else has delivered that for photographic images. It's like SVG for photography.

At the time, encoding required a) an expensive license and (IIRC) b) an accelerator board if you intended to do anything other than leave your CPU churning overnight - obvious disadvantages relative to formats like jpeg.

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