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BPG Image format

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Re: BPG Image format

#61

Post by j2kun »

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 everyone is forgetting the fact that the uncropped photograph is pornographic. So the rule should be "If you use Lena, use a similarly cropped picture of a nude male model."

Re: BPG Image format

#62

Post by geofft »

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…

There's a difference between using a picture of a human face because we've determined it's useful for the test at hand, and using a 1970s Playboy scan because that was the most convenient thing for early computer-graphics researchers in the 1970s.

In particular, the (appropriately-licensed) Kodak image set used in the Mozilla study includes multiple pictures of women, none of which are Playboy scans. The complaint is not that there's a picture of a woman, it is that _this_ particular picture keeps being used despite no particular scientific reason why it's optimal for comparing graphics formats.

http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/

Re: BPG Image format

#63

Post by cjensen »

sp332 wrote: post #8

Wow, I didn't even know there were open-source HEVC encoders. I thought there were patent issues. Now I'm off to re-encode my bluray collection!

The x265 [1] Project is great. That said, you might want to wait a year for them to improve the encode before messing with your entire collection.

[1] http://x265.org

Re: BPG Image format

#64

Post by geofft »

gambiter wrote: post #51
minikites wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a hetero male ... it's just an image. That's the exact privilege you get to enjoy as a hetero male. You get to ignore things like this when your female colleagues (if you're lucky enough to work with any) have to look at the image and be reminded that many people continue to view them as objects.

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 encourage other scientists to use the same picture, I might be a bit weirded out.

Re: BPG Image format

#65

Post by jerf »

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 of "got more hype than was justified by its ability to perform"... it isn't that it has no ability, just that it got more hype than it should have. Same thing happened to "wavelets". Yes, I know about JPEG2000... again, the point isn't that they are "bad" or "can't work" but that they got more hype than their real performance justified.)

Re: BPG Image format

#66

Post by ChrisGranger »

lbotos wrote: post #58
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…

excuse my ignorance, but encoding would happen "once" when it was created by the author, right?

That's correct. I imagine some websites and applications create images dynamically on-the-fly but most of the time they're done by the author.

Re: BPG Image format

#67

Post by derf_ »

aidenn0 wrote: post #24

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

JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP are the best-known (e.g., not toy research projects).

Re: BPG Image format

#68

Post by kibwen »

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...

Re: BPG Image format

#69

Post by sillysaurus3 »

wmf wrote: post #28
Animats wrote: post #22

The results only show marginal improvement. What's needed is a compression method that doesn't introduce artifacts on hard edges, as JPEG does, but is otherwise no worse at compression than JPEG. Then we wouldn't need to do some things in JPEG and others in PNG, and we'd be spared the pain of JPEG screenshots. Much better results on the Tecnick image set (which is mostly hard edges) would indicate one had been found.…

a compression method that doesn't introduce artifacts on hard edges, as JPEG does, but is otherwise no worse at compression than JPEG JPEG 2000? JPEG XR? Wavelets tend to produce softness instead of ringing or noise.

JPEG 2000 was encumbered by patents the last time I looked into it. Has the situation changed much?

Re: BPG Image format

#70

Post by paraboul »

jason_slack wrote: post #44

There was an interesting article about Fabrice: http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/fabrice-bellard-portrait-o... Does anyone know if he has a day job or does he just lock himself away and work on these interesting projects?

As far as I know : http://www.amarisoft.com/?p=about
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