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BPG Image format

bellard.org

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Re: BPG Image format

#101

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

geofft wrote: post #64
gambiter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're trolling, but I have a spare minute... - If I post a picture of a cute kitten, does it mean I look at a cat as an object? That I will only under-appreciate all animals because I liked a photo of one? - If I post a picture of my mother or father, am I objectifying them? - What if I take a picture of a street performer who's doing some awesome thing and post it... am I reducing them to simply an obje…

This isn't just about having a picture. I'm not sure how you got that impression. It's about the context where it comes from and the repeated use of the picture in a scientific context. If you have a picture of your parents on your desk, that's great and I respect your love for your family. If you keep using a crop of your mother from her Playboy centerfold in the '70s as a test case for your algorithms, and you enco…

>If you keep using a crop of your mother from her Playboy centerfold in the '70s as a test case for your algorithms, and you encourage other scientists to use the same picture, I might be a bit weirded out.

And who wouldn't be! But that begs the question, is there a son or daughter of Lena Soderberg who is also a researcher or software engineer working in image compression algorithms?

http://www.ee.cityu.edu.hk/~lmpo/lenna/Lenna97.html

Re: BPG Image format

#102

Post by anigbrowl »

kibwen wrote: post #68
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…

Here's the original PC Mag article: http://books.google.com/books?id=RJBJPJvct40C&pg=PA42&lpg=PA...

Great find. I worked at PC Mag UK in London at that time. I don't remember if we did a piece on it, but I do remember the oohs and aahs in the office as we zoomed in on pictures of cute dolphins and the like.

Re: BPG Image format

#103

Post by sp332 »

wmf wrote: post #99
TD-Linux wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still patent issues, and you still need to obtain a license to use the software. You will never see this image format integrated into any other open source projects, like Firefox, for this reason.

Like how you'll never see H.264, DRM, or WebKit in Firefox?

WebKit in Firefox?

Re: BPG Image format

#105

Post by DanBC »

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...

My comment is not a response to the article, but is a response to loudmax.

Re: BPG Image format

#106

Post by yoha »

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…

It's actually a very good point when you take into consideration the origin of the image. From [1]: “Lena Söderberg […] appeared as a Playmate in the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine” and it is referring to this particular photo. Article in cyrilic (Russian?) [2] shows what the uncropped version look like. Putting things in context is important.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_S%C3%B6derberg

[2] http://dimka-jd.livejournal.com/3673381.html (NSFW)

Re: BPG Image format

#107

Post by beefman »

ChrisGranger wrote: post #37
spb wrote: post #2

Don't we already have WebP?

WebP is in some ways superior, in particular because it has a lossless option like PNG. [Edit: NOPE, I was mistaken. ] I think it's kind of a shame that it hasn't caught on all that well. Maybe it's a fantasy, but I'd sure like to consolidate all web images into a single widely-supported and open source format. Ah, to dream...

I think it's nice to have separate formats for lossy and lossless compression. Makes it easy for users to tell what's going on.

Re: BPG Image format

#108

Post by msoad »

How does it compare to WebP? Also, how you measures lossy image quality? What are the metrics? I hope it's not just by looking at result and judging.

Re: BPG Image format

#109

Post by CamperBob2 »

frontsideair wrote: post #104

Very out of topic but, is lena.jpg still acceptable? I mean, tech industry is getting better at inclusion but come on, are we still using that crop from Playboy?

Considering that Lenna herself is fine with it, I'd say so. (Unless you want to deny a woman the right to permit the use of her own body for aesthetic, erotic, or academic purposes, which is the logical if ironic outcome of some schools of feminism.)

The problem with the Lenna imagery isn't political correctness, it's the fact that it's a crappy scan from a magazine that always had crappy photography to begin with.

Re: BPG Image format

#110

Post by sp332 »

bane wrote: post #42
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…

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?

Takes about 20 seconds for a 1280x893 bitmap. But the decoded image always looks blurry no matter what settings I use. The original bitmap is 3,349 kB and the IFS file ranged from 17 kB (looking awful and blocky) to 569 kB (looking about half the resolution of the original but not too bad).
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