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What Has Happened To Fractal Image Compression?

Posted by Cliff on from the why-do-the-neat-ideas-get-buried dept.

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?"

1 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. I vote for the "shiny-thing!" explanation. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3

    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.