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jpeg2000 Allows 200:1 Wavelet Compression
Polo writes "Here is an
EE times article about the ISO JPEG2000 standard that has been
finalized and allows a new wavelet compression scheme that gives
good results at as much as 200:1 compression ratios. It looks
pretty promising. It is royalty-free, but there is also discussion
about a second standard that allows third-party, royalty-based extensions. I wonder if motion-jpeg with wavelets could fit a movie
on a CD or something."
If movies become this cheap to distribute on the net, the same thing will happen to them that is happening to music. Music is starting to break free from the recording industry. Movies will do the same from the big studios. Yes, they will still make money on the really big productions. But it is going to become easier from small film makers to tell their stories. This was inevitable. The price is falling on communicating your ideas to the world in many forms. I wonder how it will change our world in ways that we haven't even guessed.
They have a patched version of XV on their page, and I've been playing with it for a bit. Its almost lossless at 25:1 compression on a Q3 screenshot I have.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
In this case, um... Lucas has me especially baffled. I didn't see any mention of intellectual property above, just of a technical standard that would allow packing more data into a given amount of bandwidth or storage capacity.
I would think the biggest market for such a thing, if applied to motion pictures, would be the manufacture of lower-cost video players, not movie piracy. The ability to pack a movie onto a CD would allow movie distributors to bring prices on their product down to the point where piracy simply wouldn't be worthwhile.
If you're going to extrapolate effects of this technology, I'd say it would be better to look at what it could (potentially) do to the video rental business, not how it could be used to steal intellectual property. I mean, if you could *buy* a movie CD for $7 or $8, who'd rent one?
- Robin
> drop the patent (I don't know if this can be done)
I am not a lawyer, but a patent can be "dropped" quite easily. Once the patent is active, its owner has to pay an annual fee, which is pretty high if you want the patent to apply world wide ("world wide" = in those countries where 95% of the global market is). If you don't pay the fee, the patent is no longer valid. This is actually done very often, because usually after 5 - 7 years, upholding a patent is not worth anymore. Either the technology is outdated, or some new patent has made the old one obsolete, or the revenues from licences with other companies no longer cover the costs - there are many reasons for dropping a patent.
Well as far as I know, the DCT is hundreds of times faster than the wavelet transform. Compare the CPU usage during mp3 compression to the CPU usage during noise reduction and you'll see the mp3 compression infinitely less intensive than the noise reduction. The heart of the noise reduction filter is a wavelet transform. Mp3 compression uses a DCT plus FFT. When they switch to wavelet based compression you can forget about making movies in software. Nevertheless if they offer a no-cost implementation Linux will be the first platform to support JPEG 2000 in Quicktime.
Basically, .mp3 will do fine until something better comes along that's supported... then it'll go the way of the LP, the 8 track, etc. For support, all one needs to do is get the major players onboard (nullsoft, real, the xmms gang and maybe mung$oft) and everyone else will pick it up for fear of being left behind.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
what characteristics of full-color images makes them especially susceptible to wavelet compression, versus say, a text file or an executable binary? :)
I'd guess perhaps the fact that it's OK to perform lossy compression on an image, and that people see image compression as 'good' if most of the main image features are there (that is, good enough that a human observer won't immediately notice a difference). You wouldn't be too happy, I suspect, if you decompressed a text file and found that gzip had trimmed it down to something resembling Cliff Notes
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
That was pretty much about time someone took the wavelets into image compression.
:)
I worked with wavelet transforms (Daubechies wavelets) a year and a half ago, and back then it was pretty clear that it would be possible to compress images and sound much harder using the wavelet domain rather than the Fourier domain.
For those who don't know, the trick is:
JPEG/MPEG/MP3 uses Fourier transform to transform the image/sound data into their spectral components. But this spectral representation of the data does not say anything about the _locality_ of the frequency components. Therefore representing spikes/discontinuties will require a very large number of frequency components when using Fourier domain, which in turn leads to poor compression. You can see this problem by drawing a few sharp lines in an image and compressing it hard with JPEG.
Wavelets on the other hand, represent both an equivalent of the frequency component, along with locality information. Spikes/discontinuities can be approximated well using only a few wavelets. This in turn leads to good compression.
Another nice thing about wavelet compression is, that wavelets tend to represent discontinuities well, even with hard compression (eg. a lot of missing or roughly approximated wavelet components). Therefore a very hard compressed image will still have fairly sharp edges, completely contrary to JPEG compression. This is pretty important if you compress a picture holding text.
Anyways, someone is now working on JPEG with wavelets... What about sound and video ?? There is no reason as to why wavelets should not provide equal improvements in both audio and video.
My personal conspiracy theory is, that there exists a *LOT* of expensive hardware that can do Fouries forwards and back to allow real-time encoding and decoding of MPEG movies in good quality. The companies producing these devices will lobby any standards-organisation to *NOT* consider wavelets and stick to good old Fourier. If this holds, it will take a few years until we see Wavelet compressed video
There's an enlightening discussion of JPEG2000 in the gimp-devel archives. See the or iginal question posted 9 Dec 1999, as well as the followup, particularly th is reply by Nick Lamb.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Maybe I'm just being too cynical, but I think that one of the major points of the JPEG2000 effort is to fix the "bug" in the original JPEG (or at least the universally implemented arithmetic coding-free subset) is patent free.
And basically, I agree with Tom's assessment here. While JPEG is far from perfect, it is "good enough" for photographic images, and the massive increases in bandwidth and storage capacity kinda make high compression ratios irrelevant.
Finally, a 200:1 compression ration is pretty meaningless without some kind of context. A much more meaningful comparison is how many bytes are required to get the same quality image as some other compression standard, such as the original JPEG. The figure itself reminds me of when Triada was hyping their 200:1 lossless compression. Joe Bugajski gave a talk on this at Berkeley, and started waxing raphsodic on the incredible stuff that the Library of Congress had in their collection. Books and audio materials were fine, but when he got to the Stradivarius violins, my fellow grad students just broke up laughing. It's not hard to imagine 200:1 compression of that, but uncompression is tricky at best
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
The comparison in the EE times article is rigged to the point of almost being faked.
Basically, what they did is take a high resolution image and compress the shit out of it with both original JPEG and JPEG2000. Yes, JPEG does poorly at such high compression ratios.
What they neglected to point out, however, is that you can get excellent results from just shrinking the image. From what I can tell, the test image is displayed as a GIF shrunk 3x from the original "3 MB" image. A very reasonable thing to do, if you want a 19k target file size, would be to first shrink the image 3x, then compress it 17:1 using plain JPEG. I tried this, and got results entirely comparable to the JPEG2000 example (the problem with my informal test is that the GIF dithering artifacts are noticeably softened, which is basically a problem with the fact that they presented the image as a GIF instead of true color).
So the bottom line is that JPEG2000 performs a lot better if you're doing something stupid with it, but take the claims of dramatically better compression with a grain of salt.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
I'm still an undergrad, a dangerous state: not educated enough to really know what I'm talking about, but educated enough to think I might. ;-)
Anyway, I'm curious: I understand that current JPEG uses Fourier transforms (a full integral transform, or a Fourier series?) to get a spectral representation of the image data, then drops subtle information from that transformed data to get a similar image from the reverse transform.
So I assume the new JPEG (aside from all the quicktime-esque formatting overhead) uses the same technique, just with a different complete set of functions, the wavelets.
So my first question: is there anything about the above that I'm misunderstanding?
And my second question: What are wavelets? Bessel functions? Something I haven't heard of? Is there a simple formula, or a simple ODE generating wavelet solutions, that I could look at or plug into Maple? I gather that whatever they are they approximate discontinuous functions with much better convergence than sines and cosines... but that could describe a lot of things.
First: The page you give me doesn't have anything to do with JPEG2000, it's some kind of proprietary wavelet compression (even worse than JPEG2000 with all the patents it _perhaps_ will have :-) ). Second, since I don't run Windows, I'd be happy if you mailed me the BMP image (possibly gzip or bzip2-compressed) -- thanks.
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
IIRC, when the original JPEG standard came out it specified how to compress images, but not a file format to store the compressed data. So there were some JPEG programs that wouldn't read or write files produced by other JPEG programs, because the file format was different.
Eventually people created the JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF) and this is what modern 'JPEG' files are stored as. I hope the standards body has given some thought to file formats this time round.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Okay, it has been shown that CSS does nothing to protect copying, per se, of DVD content. However, it does prevent format conversion, and arguably this is what the DVD CCA is most worried about.
If a DVD can be decoded with DeCSS and converted into mjpeg2 with mp3 audio, the result could possibly be stored on a single CD-R. This would make content copying considerably more convenient and less expensive than having to use DVD-R.
By no means does this justify any injunction against DeCSS, but it does prove RMS' maxim, "information wants to be free". Ultimately, it will be.
Copyright cannot be enforced by technical means, it has always relied upon good faith, combined with legal remedies against those who are caught in violation. Nothing prevents me from taking apart a copyrighted book, scanning it page by page, and reprinting it or transmitting it electronically, except my ethics and respect for law.
DVD should expect nothing more, nor less, than the same.
Peace and love, y'all
Compiled binaries can indeed be compressed.
However the compression technique has to "understand" your binary, wavelets would not be a good choice.
Just so that people understand. A compressed file is a concise description of the original file. A compression technique is an agreed upon way of describing things. And, just as you would use different methods of description for describing a book and a painting, different compression techniques are appropriate to each kind of signal.
And to clear up another piece of confusion. Lossless compression means that you have a complete description, you can recover the original exactly. Lossy compression means that you have an incomplete description. You have a description of an approximation of the original, the distinguishing details got filed in the circular file.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Anything is as compressible as you want with lossy compression. :-)
That said, our visual perception of white noise is itself a highly lossy form of compression, therefore it is easy to fool.
Incidentally wavelets are widely used for "denoising" because they are able to handle both smooth regions and sharp boundaries. Therefore they are much better at concentrating the sharp edges into a relatively small number of big components, so that you can distinguish a sharp edge from white noise. Fourier transforms don't do a good job of telling the two apart, and are therefore frequently unsuitable for denoising.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
It doesn't matter if some of the pixels match if which ones do is random, so it is at least as hard to specify per pixel what it matches as it is to say per pixel what it is.
Understanding it that way could be complex, let me give the direct definition for a binary signal.
A source of a stream of 1's and 0's is a white noise generator if each digit is randomly (50-50 odds) and independently a 1 or a 0. The resulting signal carries the maximal information/pixel possible, and hence there can exist no compression method that is an overall win in compressing white noise.
What does this look like? Start tossing a coin and record what comes up! (OK, that is not perfect but it is close enough.)
As an image it looks like..static.
When played, the noise sounds like..static.
Any signal with a large amount of information/bit looks like white noise and hence looks like..static.
It is a fundamental fact of information theory that white noise (which resembles static) is identical with a perfectly encrypted signal is identical with a perfectly compressed signal.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
White noise, by definition, has no redundancy.
:-)
Many things that look like white noise are not, but white noise itself?
Incidentally static is what white noise sounds like, and any efficiently compressed signal looks like white noise, which is why a modem sounds like static.
Another interesting fact - a compressed file is a pretty good source of random data, and a compressed encrypted file is substantially more secure than a file just encrypted with the same algorithm. OTOH an encrypted compressed file is a PoS. The encryption messes up the attempted compression.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Looks sweet.
We need to get support for this in gimp, ee, etc...
It'd be cool if these beat commercial packages to the punch.
Hang on, isn't that a 256 color GIF they used for the comparison?
Yeah, I noticed that too. Kind of like those TV ads that show an HDTV picture... they don't look too impressive on my ordinary TV set.
My guess is that they used GIF so they could control the color palette and make the presented images appear to approximate the image appearance. In other words, it's a demo.
--JT
I thought this article might be a good place to mention AT&T's DjVu image format. I have been working with their DjVu tools to develop quite a few web applications and they are phenominal. The format takes an image (it is designed for scanned documents) and creates an IW44 (wavlet compressed) background layer of the image and then creates a non-lossy overlay foreground layer to compress foreground components like text and lines.
The net result? 300 dpi full page scans in under 50K! When you print them, they are true enough to the original to justify the difference between a 5MB TIFF and the 50K DjVu.
I'm very glad to see some of the same technology being adopted into JPEG. I'm kind of dissapointed that the spec doesn't seem to allow the mixing of compression algorithm's inside of one image, which is what most all of the very very good compression methods seem to rely on -- the fact that different information in the same chunk of data can be optimally compressed in different ways. I mean, depending on the image, JPEG in some cases can smear wavlet-based methods into the dirt.
Just some food for thought...
~GoRK
When IE-whatever supports JPEG2000, I'll move to them on my website - but only 'cause I don't have to make a living from it.
If you mean Starfleet Academy, those cut scenes looked pretty dire (the colour was terrible).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The inventor and holder of the patents for fractal compression is Iterated Systems.
I'd thought they'd had these techniques rolled into JPEG and MPEG already but it looks like you're right, they've kept the techniques for their own products.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I remember reading about fractal compression, which was supposed to blow JPG away. It was in the early 90s, and obviously it didn't have much effect on the industry.
Because the inventor held onto the patent too closely. Fractal compression works... encoding is horribly slow but decompression isn't too bad at all. Compression ratios are amazing, better than wavelet I think. But if the inventor ever wants to see it in widespread use, he has to let go and make it free.
*sigh*
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I find it strangely disturbing that the ISO would resort to year version numbers. Aren't they supposed to be one of the few non-commercial, 'above the hype', good-of-the-state-of-the-art entities out there?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Hang on, isn't that a 256 color GIF they used for the comparison?
Anyway... it sure looks promising, but I'm not really impressed by that 158:1 result on this particular image, most of it comprises of a gradient that should compress rather well with their scheme. I'd like to see results with images containing more detail.
-W
I haven't bothered checking out the spec in its entirety, but I've got to wonder about a few things:
1. Is the 2:1 5/3 'mother wavelet' truly lossless for any and all inputs?
2. What kind of 'average' compression can we expect? One poster already mentioned that the example had a simple gradient as a background which would certainly compress well.
3. How CPU intensive is it to decode these things? Will MJPEG2000 (or whatever) practically require a hardware decoder for DVD-quality playback?
Anyone care to comment,refute, or otherwise flame? *g*
I'm no expert, but I've been working with the FFTW - "the Fastest Fourier Transform in the West" - and it's really kick-ass fast. I've been wondering what kind of FT algorithm these image-compression guys tend to use. I figure, a faster FT means less time required to compress and decompress data, which in turn means that more detailed data that once was unfeasibly large and slow to process will not cease to be large, but may cease to be slow. May this yield a feasible alternative? FTs are "the workhorse of DSP" - a very well-known and familiar technique. So why not? (I'm sure there's a damn good reason why not...)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Wavelets CAN be theoretically best, depending on the type of the information. Each basis is best at encoding things that look like the basis vectors: thus the Fourier basis is best for encoding sine waves. And for pictures that have localized bumps (like most normal pictures), wavelets that have localized bumps will do best.
Oh, and best here can be rigorously defined: just plot mean squared error vs number of components. The lower, the better.
Also, there are fast wavelet transforms. In fact, some of them are O(N), rather than O(N ln N) as for the FFT. Again though, depends on the wavelets that you're using.
Seeing a story like this makes me wonder what the time lapse is going to be between the time a standard is issued and the time it can actually spead into wide usage. Look at PNG, which has been around for around 4 years now. Sure, some people can view PNGs in their browsers, but support is still imcomplete in most implementations despite its both technical and legal improvements on the ol' GIF format. Its still not to the point where a mainstream web site would want to use it for fear of shutting out some users.
Lets see here you need updated graphics programs (I'm sure GIMP and Photoshop, et al can have this fairly quickly). You need updated browsers (should be rather easy for Netscape/Mozilla, and technically not to difficult for IE, depending on whenever MS wants to get around to it). I'm still thinking 2 to 3 years before you seed wide usage, which is unfortunate becuase the big advantage is for those of us still stuck using lousy POTS lines to connect to the internet. Ironically, those who would get the biggest benefit from this (like be on this on-a-good-day 28.8 line) will probably have broadband access of one sort or another by the time it becomes widely used for the web at least.
Then again, the whole 28.8 to 56K changeover seemed to happen rather quickly and both required upgrading your hardware, and a dueling set of standards....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
music is made from waveforms. What you would see on an ocilliscope if you were plaing the audio. It has nothing to do with wavelet technology, witch only applies to images and video
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
DVD disks are not anymore exspensive then CDs.
The only diffrence between the two is the laser used. DVD drives cost about the same amount. In anyevent, DVD moves cost about as much as audio CDs, so I don't see why putting movies on CD would make them any cheaper.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The best thing to do if you want something supported is to create a free library written in C like IJG did for normal JPEG. Almost everybody is using their code because it's stable and portable.
That way, all browser creators have to do is link it into their project... At least that works for an additional image file format decoder.
There is only a Windows player available, but the nice codec written for low bitrates is basically nothing but MPEG-4, which is a standard. So, a player could be created - see http://www.microsoft.com/asf/aboutASF.htm .
I haven't seen any discussion here of Geographic Information Systems applications, so I thought I'd chime in.
We've been using MrSID compression on an environmental information system. We've been using sat photos as base layers on maps, and plotting data on top of the map. MrSID is a wavelet compresseion system that is now supported in several commercial GIS packages.
There are three really cool aspects of wavelet compression.
First, there is the raw compression; 10 or 20:1. Since we work with satelite photos of entire counties, these can easily be well over 200MB per image. Keeping a bunch of uncompressed images around is pretty awkward, and normally you need a number of them (different seasons or months, leaf on leaf off; black and white/infrared; etc.) With this kind of compression you can burn a pretty comprehensive library of images onto a CD.
Second, there is speed. You can open up a map of a good size county, and the image loads very, very quickly, but looks very sharp, because it throws out detail too small to be seen. As you zoom in, it clips out the region you can't see, and brings in another level of detail, so the map repaints and still looks sharp. You can easily start with a map 100 miles across, then zoom down to less than a mile across, with individual buildings easily recognizable. With uncompressed images, you could not use the same image to cover the wider geographic areas because display would be very slow. It makes for terrific demos -- being able to zoom from an astronoauts view to the view from a small plane feels like you've strapped on a pair of seven leage boots.
Finally, there when you go beyond the zoom level where there is no more data, instead of getting sharp pixel boundaries you get smudgy edges -- like you are a little out of focus. This is less distracting and more intuitive than seeing large, blocky pixels.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yow. I just finished reading the dvd thread then this pops up. DeCSS aside, could this do for movie piracy what mp3's did for music?
OTOH, it could also be a boon for home or low budget movie makers.
P.S. I could claim "first post", but that would either be wrong or obvious.
Ideology is for ideots.
I am blindly posting this without first trawling through other posts or going through the web on a research tramp, so take it with a grain of salt.
You can think of all things as functions. An image, for example, is a function of two variables, x and y, which give a pixel location. The function should return a color, and perhaps an alpha value. Fundamentally, one should be able then, to simply write down the formula for an image on a napkin. The image can then be generated by simply filling in the formula over the domain (width and height).
In practice, however, it is very difficult to derive this function. So we must approximate until it is close enough. As I see it, this is basically what wavelets do. They approximate the function with a series of trigonometric wave functions.
If you think about movies, now, they are just really frame after frame of images. So you simply have a three-variable function: x, y, and frame #. Theoretically, you should be able to reduce a movie to a function also. and just feed in three variables and be able to render an image.
I guess you could also represent images and movies as functions which returned matrices. You could probably do some nifty mathematics which would account for areas which stayed the same and would not have to be changed again...essentially 'masking' the new image over and over again with new image matrices.
Anyway, that is my take. It might not be perfectly accurate, but I've always thought of images, and movies, and data in general (the same procedure can be performed on arbitrary binary streams), as simply functions of position.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
There is no optimal image compression
This is dead wrong for non-lossy compression.. which is obviously what he is talking about (since he mentioned information theorey). He is making two eperate statments (1) you can not do any better with a non-lossy algorithm (but the compression phase is slow) and (2) wavelets degrade better then anyhting else if you start leaving out the big parts (lossy compression).
You could start spouting bushit about how (2) is subjective, but (2) is not the part of his post which you quoted.. and (2) is probable stil true *enough* in the near future.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
The difference is that PNG isn't proprietary. It can be supported by any Web browser, but some don't because they're old versions. It's good when the standards improve, because then the web browsers don't have to invent their own rules just to make any progress.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Am I the only one who thought:
"What a great way to piss of the RIAA, make the DVD consortium superflous, and archive my multiple gigs of porn on one CD in one fell swoop."
:-)
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The JPEG committee page has links to more information regarding this image format. http://www.jpeg.org/public/jpeglinks.htm
Wavelet image compression has been around for several years now, mostly in proprietary form. Let me give you one particular link - and no I don't work for them :)
Lightning Strike
Best regards,
SEAL
Listen to yourself. What future do you really want? A future run by corporations or a future run by people? I think the answer is pretty obvious, since corporations consist of people.
Fact is one of them has to lose over the other in the future. Corporations can't grow in power without abusing people, and people can't earn and live out their rights without lost revenue to corporations.
It's as simple as that.
In their eyes, the best way for corporations to earn money is to drug us down and make us their drones. Then they can do whatever they want of society. But what is really the point of that? So that a small elite can feel powerful and rich? There should be something else to life than that, and that means power and freedom to the individuals to do what their hearts desires.
In the future DVDs WILL be copied and pirated, since we're going to count storage in Tb instead of Gb. This could have a positive effect on the movie-bussiness, as they will have to come up with better answers to people's needs. Ie, bigger cinema screens, social aspects of movie-going, physical effects etc. The initiative-takers of this will be the ones who earn money from their ideas. Upstarts and copycats without one creative idea in their mind will as previously, not.
People that claim piracy are hurting corporations, forget what side is the most human. We don't live this life for corporations to grow on us. The more power you give them, the more numerous and bigger they get. So there have to be some resistance. Call it illegal. Call it perverted, or whatever you like, but I doubt it has ever hurt the bussiness as they claim it have. When they say that, they're thinking about quite a different reality than this one.
Think about that.
- Steeltoe
PS: This is not FUD, it's just to show the extreme that could happen if we suddenly just "gave up", stopped thinking for- and talking among ourselves. In some countries this has already happened, but with governments, which is much more probable.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
We tried to license Intel's Wavelet compression used by RealNetworks and Microsoft in their video players (look for the "Optimized for Intel" logo), but when we disclosed that our player was a Java based solution, they quickly refused to let us work with them. It seems that no price could get us in the game; they gave us the feeling that it was more important to keep the technology firmly rooted to the hardware than to get a license fee from their IP. Not too much of a surprise, since Intel backed out of the consortium for the Java Media Framework API after v. 1. Too bad all the IP that IBM brought to the consortium didn't have a Wavelet tool kit...
Well, this is too cool. I hope mozilla supports the standard right out of the box. That way I can start designing my web pages with it! On a related note, when the hell will gifs finally die! I'm amazed at how long it is taking for pngs to catch on. If this is any indication, I wouldn't expect to be able to include jpg2000 images on my web site for several years.
Wavelet compression of video has been out for a while. Indeo 4 and 5 (but not Indeo 1,2, and 3) use wavelet compression. The Indeo 5 codec for .AVI files is a major improvement over Cinepak, the previous leader in .AVI codecs. Indeo 5 has far fewer annoying artifacts than Cinepak, even at higher compression ratios. Check out my Kick the Crooks Out, 15 seconds of Indeo 5 video.
Did wavelets a few years ago in uni, so I hope I've not screwed up my information in the few years lag, but another few points to add to this excellent summary:
1) It has been proved that a wavelets can represent the theoretical minimum information for an image. Proof uses the information's counterpart of the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. That's right folks - you cannot get any more compressed than that - it simply isn't possible.
2) Unfortunately, finding the coefficients for the minimum possible representation is a bit hard on the computation side - so normally certain constraints are made like fixing the angles of the wavelet. However, decompression is pretty much standard in any case - easier. But nothing quite as close as FFT.
3) JPEG chops the picture into managable bits - you may get discontinuities at boundaries. Wavelets sweep across the picture, from big to small, gradually improving the quality at smaller areas. So you can get a nice smooth degradation of details if you decrease the size of the file - or in other words, if you are downloading incrementally, your picture kinda shimmers in nicely.
4) Wavelets have a normal like-curve. Normal like curves occur frequently in nature -- for example the human face can actually be represented by very few wavelets - the eyes, nose, mouth, face all fit quite nicely. Probably good for photos.
(http://www.luratech.com/products/productoverview/ pricelist_e.html)
What I can't find is information regarding the patents/etc. regarding the new format - anyone?
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Here are some quotes from an article about JPEG2000:
Since August of 1998, a team within the Digital Imaging Group (DIG) has been developing a rich file format for JPEG 2000
It surely took a long time to develop it. I hope it's worth it.
Image authors will also have the option of saving the picture in lossless format for archival storage
This is great! It means I no longer need to keep all of these uncomressed BMP files lying around.
Wavelet technology also provides for a continuous download stream of data that allows the user to control the amount of image resolution desired
This is also great. If I understand it correctly, it will allow you to download 30% of the image and get 30% of the quality, download %50 and get 50% quality or download it all and get full quality. But I might be mistaken.
Another innovation is that a new standard, "sRGB" will be the default colorspace for this format. In the current JPEG standard, there is no notion of default colorspace. This lack of precision contributes to inconsistent JPEG color rendering
This is a Good Thing, too. Great for printing.
The JPEG 2000 standard for metadata also provides for extensibility of the metadata properties. In other words, new functionality can be added without having to rewrite the standard. And speaking of adding information, the metadata catalog can be modified without having to rewrite the entire image file. These abilities make for a very nimble, adaptable image file format
Well, we don't seem to need this (using different formats is easier). If the format is too extensible, it can lead to the "get-the-latest-viewer-you-moron!" syndrome, like all the problems with the HTML that we have now.
If all goes as planned, the official schedule for implementation will be released in January 2000
Other good links:
.j2k files for your viewing pleasure (I wish a had a viewer :-)
JPEG2000 Requirements and profiles document, V.6.0
SEMINAR ON IMAGING SECURITY AND JPEG2000 - this is an interesting collection of documents about digital image security and watermarking. These gyus take security seriously!
JPEG2000 bitstreams - actual
JPEG2000 Decoder (Version 2.3.1) - written in Java, the source is not available yet (it will be)
Barthel said this patented variable-sized window-scanning technique has been incorporated into the JPEG2000 committee draft. Besides LuraTech, Ricoh and several other committee members found bits and pieces of their patented technology in the spec. Barthel said all involved companies have signed agreements that give developers royalty-free rights to part one of JPEG2000.
The open source community should be very conserned about this issues. We don't want the LZW patent screw-up with the GIF format to happen again. There are two sollutions: either drop the patent (I don't know if this can be done, any lawyers?), or make sure that the software using it can be GPLed forever. The word "forever" is very important, so that we won't have any problems.
I believe that we should put enough pressure on this standart and make it really free. If the screenshots are real, it is definitely worth it.
By the way, I am not completely sure that this is real. Something like this usually pops up every second year, and usually it's fake. I remember reading about fractal compression, which was supposed to blow JPG away. It was in the early 90s, and obviously it didn't have much effect on the industry.
Such advances are really great for the IT industry and the commmunity. I can't wait for downloadable high qualit movies to become available. The next big thing after MP3 will be movies. Either pirated or commercial, movies will be available on the Internet. I can see all the big movie companies making movies available for download for a small charge (even if it's $3 or $5 I will gladly pay it, instead of spending hours looking for the same movie on some pirate site. The Internet will drop the marketing and distribution costs for most of the movies, and it will make it profitable to make the files available, even if the piracy level stays high.