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Silly Image Compression Idea

snufk.in

11–20 of 59 posts

Re: Silly Image Compression Idea

#11

This reminded me of a weird idea that I had several years ago (which is kind of opposite of this): What if there was a format that doesn't encode pixels but generates a "description" of the images using AI, of simple shapes to higher-level objects, and saves that in its own format, with a "decoder" that takes this input description format and constructs an image similar to the original, at least to some extent. Of co…

This could be useful to reduce Disney’s bandwidth costs. Marvel and Star Wars productions are highly repetitive anyway, so maybe they could ship a preloaded Marvel neural network in the player app and design new movies to take maximum advantage of the clichés already encoded there.

Re: Silly Image Compression Idea

#12
PixelCNN++ does this, kinda. Residual blocks that use downsampled versions of the image. Though in that context, it gets used for lossless compression by entropy coding the likelihoods of each pixel.

This idea - trying to investigate behavior at different scale parameters - is also related to renormalization. But I think you can go further than this - currently you are just preserving that which remains consistent. You should also somehow store the complement of that information - the difference between the original and what you get after downscaling then upscaling the downscaled version again.

I imagine it's going to be mostly the noisy data local to certain regions of the image, some kind of high frequency details. But if you keep track of both, you can make each rescaling bijective, making your 'compression' invertible, hence lossless, in some sense. Whether you get any size savings doing that is another question altogether :^)

Re: Silly Image Compression Idea

#14
> What would image compression look like if designed around other things perceptions?

If the other creature's vision is in a different wavelength range, then RGB images are not applicable to it at all, in the first place.

Re: Silly Image Compression Idea

#15

This reminded me of a weird idea that I had several years ago (which is kind of opposite of this): What if there was a format that doesn't encode pixels but generates a "description" of the images using AI, of simple shapes to higher-level objects, and saves that in its own format, with a "decoder" that takes this input description format and constructs an image similar to the original, at least to some extent. Of co…

It's called SVG :)

Re: Silly Image Compression Idea

#16

This reminded me of a weird idea that I had several years ago (which is kind of opposite of this): What if there was a format that doesn't encode pixels but generates a "description" of the images using AI, of simple shapes to higher-level objects, and saves that in its own format, with a "decoder" that takes this input description format and constructs an image similar to the original, at least to some extent. Of co…

Venor Vinge, A Fire Upon The Deep (1992):

>Fleet Central refused the full video link coming from the Out of Band … Kjet had to settle for a combat link: The screen showed a color image with high resolution. Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation…. Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they looked several years out of style: old video matched with the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less than four thousand bits per second

>The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people Kjet knew had been transferred before the fall of Sjandra Kei. The processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrowband signal from Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background and evoking the image shown.

Re: Silly Image Compression Idea

#17
post #4

Compression with no plan in sight for decompression... at least it's billed as "silly" first and foremost.

Compression doesn’t imply decompression… see JPEG, H264, etc…

Maybe you could elaborate… what do you mean? Both of those examples (JPEG, H264) have decompressors for viewing, right?

Re: Silly Image Compression Idea

#18
post #11

This reminded me of a weird idea that I had several years ago (which is kind of opposite of this): What if there was a format that doesn't encode pixels but generates a "description" of the images using AI, of simple shapes to higher-level objects, and saves that in its own format, with a "decoder" that takes this input description format and constructs an image similar to the original, at least to some extent. Of co…

This could be useful to reduce Disney’s bandwidth costs. Marvel and Star Wars productions are highly repetitive anyway, so maybe they could ship a preloaded Marvel neural network in the player app and design new movies to take maximum advantage of the clichés already encoded there.

They used to literally reuse the animation in older Disney films, just with different characters on top. You could send that information, the scene and the characters, in significantly fewer bits than it would take as video

Re: Silly Image Compression Idea

#20

This reminded me of a weird idea that I had several years ago (which is kind of opposite of this): What if there was a format that doesn't encode pixels but generates a "description" of the images using AI, of simple shapes to higher-level objects, and saves that in its own format, with a "decoder" that takes this input description format and constructs an image similar to the original, at least to some extent. Of co…

that's roughly the idea for gan-based image compression, check out: https://data.vision.ee.ethz.ch/aeirikur/extremecompression
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