31–40 of 59 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You can’t restore a jpeg to its original image.
Why stop at the 'AI's limit? We can do better than that. Keep going until a human can no longer recognise the image! (There's always a mechanical Turk to do the work.) And why stop when the image is unrecognisable? Why not translate the image of (say) a cat into an image of the word 'cat'? And if you've done that compression, take it a step further - translate the image of the cat into the text string 'cat'. Now you'…
Why stop at the 'AI's limit? We can do better than that. Keep going until a human can no longer recognise the image! (There's always a mechanical Turk to do the work.) And why stop when the image is unrecognisable? Why not translate the image of (say) a cat into an image of the word 'cat'? And if you've done that compression, take it a step further - translate the image of the cat into the text string 'cat'. Now you'…
A long time ago I thought that this kind of compression could be interesting for voice chat/phone calls. Locally convert speech to text, send raw text over the wire, and convert text back to speech. You could fine tune some existing text to speech model to sound like you. Once you transfer that to your friends/frequent contacts you could have voice conversations over very low bandwidth channels. There are obviously p…
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-conferenc...
Like regular JPG encoding, this can be set to an arbitrary level of "good enough."
A sort-of related idea is: How small can an image of a human face be and still be recognizable? I remember X-face images from mail headers years ago -- these were just 48 x 48 x 1 pixel images, i.e., just 288 bytes (yes, bytes, not KB or MB). I marveled that the faces were indeed recognizable. I wish I could find an example of an X-face of a famous person (or even an unknown person) to give as an example here, but th…
[.] https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/papers/Hu_Fi... Figure 9
I do wonder if all the new AI-based "upscaling" algorithms, which can fill in detail to make an image larger, can be used to produce a compression-decompression algorithm: Perform a heavily lossy compression, then "upscale" the result and see if it returns to a good-enough match. If so, compress even further, until your upscaling no longer gives you a good-enough match. Like regular JPG encoding, this can be set to a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A long time ago I thought that this kind of compression could be interesting for voice chat/phone calls. Locally convert speech to text, send raw text over the wire, and convert text back to speech. You could fine tune some existing text to speech model to sound like you. Once you transfer that to your friends/frequent contacts you could have voice conversations over very low bandwidth channels. There are obviously p…
Well there's already speech-oriented codecs that can go down below a kilobyte per second, and there's this one that throws a neural net at the problem to help squeeze bytes: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/08/soundstream-end-to-end-neu... I don't think I've ever had a functional connection slower than that. You need packets to be making it through in a timely manner if you want a voice conversation, after all.
I _may_ still have a 300 baud modem in a box in the garage. Possibly a 1200/75 one too. (1985 sometimes doesn't seem _that_ long ago...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen worse; someone presented code for decompression of a fictional data format with no plan in sight for compression. When I asked how the compression part would be implemented, the author called me stupid for asking this question and told me the project was inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
Reminds me when I as a 14 year old, barely two years after I started learning programming and having just learned about cyclic redundancy check (CRC), wondered why they couldn't be used for compression. Take a block of say 16 bytes, calculate the CRC code and store that. To decompress you then just had to find the string of bytes that generated a matching CRC code. It seemed so brilliant, but something told me it was…
That's "dictionary" compression still. AI checks for hints to lookup in well... dictionary. If the dictionary changes, your compression results change too.