Anyone interested in inprovements in still image compression?

[imcold]

Anyone interested in inprovements in still image compression? I found this one interesting: http://www.bilsen.com/index.htm?http://www.bilsen.com/aic/
Video & audio codecs evolve rapidly; shouldn't people think about some alternative to jpeg too? What do you think?

[feedback]

It is an interesting subject.
I know people that, unwittingly, only want to compress their photos as much as possible in jpeg without regard to loss of information. They use lossy rotatation and several edits of their precious keepsake photos without even knowing they are degrading their jpeg images.
BTW, don't most pro photographers edit in Tiff or RAW?

Regards,

[foxyshadis]

I like jp2, been using it for a while, but not really enough to rave. It's only an incremental improvement over jpeg except at the very bottom of the quality scale. Still watching bandlets, curvelets, and ridgelets very closely however, which promise even more significant gains over jp2 wavelets.

But I guess for most people jpeg is good enough, simple enough, and fast enough for most uses, like wmv or mpeg, even though better alternatives exist.

I'll try AIC, always up for something new, but my usual qality level is probably too high. I just wish image compression guys would use SSIM along with PSNR for more accurate readings. ^^;

[Doobie]

Nope, no interest in improvements in still image compression.

Jpeg is sufficiently good.
Jpeg is the universal standard.
Nothing I've seen is significantly better than jpeg.

[Shinigami-Sama]

png works for me, I use jpg for low-qual stuff like post snippets and such

[siddharthagandhi]

Yes, I use JPEG too, but if there is a new format that is adapted as an industry standard I would have no problem switching.

[unmei]

[quote=doobie]Nothing I've seen is significantly better than jpeg.[/doobie]
Yes for lossy image compression it comes down to that for me as well. Still, it is an intersting topic. I just don't have the size problem with lossy images. I guess this is also why jp2k never really made it - 10 or 20% gain just don't cut it in that area.

[Sirber]

I'm prefectly happy with JPEG, and file size is not a problem anymore :)

[Doobie]

Some of these ultra-high resolution pictures from my digital camera might make for some demand for something better than jpeg. But, that's really up to the camera makers, and they're not going to change.

[feedback]

Well I have a hypothetical question.
If you had the last best digital photo, that you cherished, of your mother or father or friend or wife or child or sibling or cat or dog or any other living thing that has since died, would you still want to save it in a lossy image format? If not, what format would you save it in and where would you save it (Hard drive, DVD, CD etc.)?

Regards,:)

[Sirber]

@feedback

Get a SLR camera and keep the uncompressed RAW.

[siddharthagandhi]

I would save it on my Hard Drive and I would save it as a bitmap, which I believe is the best quality format (but has a big size).

[jon.schaffer]

I would save it as a bitmapI think you'll lose some hard disk space... PNG format will decrease the file size without any loss in quality. Plus it is compatible with internet browsers. Plus: with 'artificial' pictures, the file size is smallest than JPG. Only drawback: encoding time.

[siddharthagandhi]

"Only drawback: encoding time."

Encoding time?!@?!?@?@??

Since when did it take more than a second to save a picture?

[Shinigami-Sama]

thats what I was wondering, granted photoshop took about a 1/2 second to save a 1280:800 screen cap that one day...
it cant be that much o.O
...can it?

[imcold]

If you had the last best digital photo, that you cherished, of your mother or father or friend or wife or child or sibling or cat or dog or any other living thing that has since died, would you still want to save it in a lossy image format? If not, what format would you save it in and where would you save it (Hard drive, DVD, CD etc.)?

I would have possibly printed it ;) I store my photos on HDD and I have backups on DVD too (and possibly on some server). ;) Just to be sure I won't loose them... it has happened to me already :/

"Only drawback: encoding time."

Encoding time?!@?!?@?@??

Since when did it take more than a second to save a picture?

Well, it can take various time... Purely depends on copression complexicity, optimalizations and image size. I tied saving 1280x544px image in XnView to PNG (compression level 9), it took about 2s on AMD Sempron 2800.

[unmei]

Paintshop chokes a bit when i try to use the "export to png" function on a high resolution scan as it wants to precalculate the size and show a preview. But in normal save png works well, it just takes several seconds (10-15 or so, but that is for about 4500x3000 pixel and my comp is only a 2 ghz athlon xp).
Irfan views extra compression png plugin is also quite slow, like other PNG compressors that systematically try out every method and in multiple passes, it can easily take several seconds even for small images.

[Shinigami-Sama]

well what about pure encoding it?
like just no fancy options with all the stuff editing software uses, are there any benchmarks?
cause I"m interested in this now..

[unmei]

Well the normal "save as" i mentioned the time for doesn't have a preview/size prediction.
Also it's (paintshop's) save time is about comparable to using the delphi PNGObject (http://pngdelphi.sourceforge.net) class to save. I guess that is about as pure encoding as it gets, apart from the in this case probably marginal efficiency difference between delphi and C compiler.
It really depends on the compression effort made, the (i think default) compression level 7 is a lot faster than level 9 (max). I think about 0.5-1.0 megapixel/s (24bit,level 9) sounds about right, on that athlon @2ghz; and doobie's sempron 2800 seems to be in a similar range.

[jon.schaffer]

Encoding time?!@?!?@?@??
:)
I often retouch photos. To avoid working with JPEG and multiple saving (reencoding) processes, I first convert my pictures to PNG. 3008x2000 res. : it take several seconds for each file with my P4 3GHz... imagine a batch conversion with dozens of pictures! (and this without the maximum compression level)

Edit: and... yes, it depends on the software. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are very very unoptimized (does this word exist?) when saving in PNG

[Doobie]

Microsoft has announce Windows Media Photo. It does lossless as well as lossy, both with the same algorithm. The lossy supposedly is as good as jpeg2000 but as easy on the system as jpg. So, it does look like we'll be seeing something seriously challenge jpg.

[imcold]

Oh no! Not from M$ :D

[foxyshadis]

"as good as jpeg2000"? But jp2-ls and jpeg-ls are already about on par as to size, and not a great deal better than png. All three are pretty slow, but jpeg-ls is usually the faster.

Do they mean a lossless as efficient as lossy jp2 but as fast as jpeg? That's insane, unless they have breakthrough research in the field that no one else has ever seen before.

[Doobie]

Do they mean a lossless as efficient as lossy jp2 but as fast as jpeg? That's insane, unless they have breakthrough research in the field that no one else has ever seen before.

Oops, I mistyped. I've corrected the message. The lossless compression is claimed to be about 2.5:1.

[foxyshadis]

Okay, that makes a lot more sense, thanks. It's actually quite easy to get jp2 efficiency at near jpeg speeds, because of new research, new algorithms, and new optimizations. (And new hardware making speed less of an issue.) But none of them are standards, which means they mostly exist as research papers, source code, sometimes command-line utilities, but never integrated into an OS or useful commercial software. Even if microsoft pushes their not-a-standard format in Vista, it'll take years to catch on with adobe, gimp, older systems, hardware makers, and more. Assuming they don't just close it up, which I presume they aren't dumb enough to do.

The best of all worlds would be if they released it as a standard, like their new office format. jpeg2007 or something, I don't know. :p

[Morte66]

It is an interesting subject.
BTW, don't most pro photographers edit in Tiff or RAW?

Edit and archive, yes.

For delivery, that would usually be TIFF for fine art going to a printer/publisher on CD/DVD.

News types are more likely to use JPEG (about Photoshop level 9) for pix going back to the office over wires. JPEG is fine at that level, way better than any printing technology that's going to be used.

At lower file sizes, e.g. amateurs shooting all day on one card, you could see some benefit from better algortihms. Pros just carry extra cards (or get their assistants to carry them).

[MfA]

If you are interested in the algorithms behind windows media photo you can probably find them all on Rico Malvar's homepage.

They already said it uses lapped biorthogonal transforms and a novel color space. Malvar pretty much pioneered lapped transforms and the color space is probably YCoCg-R. He has a patent on adaptive Golomb-Rice&run-length coding which I assume is the entropy coding.