What Has Happened To Fractal Image Compression?

Dennis Thrysøe asks: "In 1995/1996 Iterated Systems (Michael Barnsley) made a program that compressed/decompressed images with fractal compression technology. It was for real, pretty fast and really worked. It was even free, except if you wanted to make your own program, that compressed images from the libraries. What on earth happened to this field of technology? You can still find the same old version of 'Fractal Imager 1.1', but has it been developed on since? Has anybody else implemented anything (open/free) that really works? Fractals / Iterated function systems are REALLY amazing for compressing images, but why aren't they being used more?"

Comments

For mainstream acceptance it needs browser support

[Kris_J]

Before any image format becomes so huge that you can't help but notice it everywhere it needs built-in support in Netscape and IE -- at least. Generally it needs the support in at least two full versions before content creators think that it's safe to use (ie; support is included in version X.0 but isn't used until version X+1.0).

Apart from that, fractal image compression probably is being used all 'round the place, just in internal applications and closed communications that you and I don't see.

I vote for the "shiny-thing!" explanation.

[Christopher Thomas]

I think that the licensing issue *might* be what killed it, or at least stunted its growth.

I have doubts about that. The license would have been for one specific type of fractal compression; however, the idea was known to enough people that if licensing was a big issue, several other groups would have created their own replacement based on any of a variety of algorithms. I'm sure I'm not the only hobbyist who played with my own compression programs in those days.

I think that the first poster's explanation is the most plausible. Years ago, fractal compression was the latest toy that programmers played with in their free time. Now, it wavelet compression, or something other than compression.

There will still be people playing with fractal compression in their free time. If it's useful, we may see results eventually.

Photoshop Plugin

[titus-g]

Altamira produce a photoshop plugin based on iterated's FIF .

Sometimes use it to send high quality images by email, just have to be sure the person you are sending to have the same program.

Not sure what happened to Iterated's own app, although seem to remember reading on their site way back that they were working with someone else of a streaming video application for it?

Maybe they sold it, or maybe just shut up about it till they had their final product (and if there are better methods now it could just have been dropped).

Re:I think its the technology.

[whatnotever]

"It just dosen't make sense for me (or, I think, for your average computer user) to compress image files, given the currently available hardware."

You are compressing (or at least decompressing) images. JPEG and GIF and PNG and others are all compressed image formats. If they weren't, you would be downloading something more than ten times as much data to view every webpage.

Example: The Slashdot logo, top left on every page. It's a 3,473 byte GIF. Uncompressed, it's 59,848 bytes.

Even with today's technology, data compression is a BIG DEAL, for images or anything else.

I think that the licensing issue *might* be what killed it, or at least stunted its growth. Would we be using GIFs so much had Unisys been a tyrant about it's little patent back when GIFs were catching on? (I sure hope Unisys wasn't a tyrant back then, because otherwise my argument is dead...)