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Google Releases New Image Format Called WebP
An anonymous reader writes "Google has released WebP, a lossy image format based on the image encoding used by VP8 (the video codec used in Google's WebM video format) to compress keyframes. According to the FAQ, WebP achieves an average 39% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000 while maintaining image quality. A gallery on the WebP homepage has a selection of images which compare the original JPEG image with the WebP encoded image shown as a PNG. There's no information available yet on which browsers will support the WebP image format, but I imagine it will be all the browsers which currently have native WebM support — Firefox, Chrome, and Opera."
Independent analysis of WebP is available from a few different sources.
I don't agree. Take a look at the NFL logo on the football player's jersey just below his neck. If you zoom in and compare then you'll see the WebP version is crisper.
Are there any specific portions of the images where you feel JPEG has better clarity, so others can compare them as well?
Better known as 318230.
That's because the scaled down preview JPEGs are compressed twice which is completely idiotic of course. Check out the unscaled images for the real deal.
The images from the x264 comparison are the most striking. In particular, compare the parasol. With the H.264 keyframe, you can see the spokes and the structure. With the JPEG version, there's some macroblocking, but the features are detectable. With the WebP one, it is just a red circle. The rest of the image is similar.
This is really a shame. Replacing JPEG is probably worthwhile - it's an ancient standard in computing terms. It comes from 1992, making it about the same age as the web. We have almost two decades of image encoding research to build on since then and, almost as importantly, computers are now much more powerful. The first web browser I used was on a 386, which was just about fast enough that the modem was the bottleneck when decoding JPEG images. Now, decoding even large JPEG images doesn't tax my CPU, so we have a lot more cycles to play with for efficient compression. Things like JPEG-2000 provide this, but because they're newer there is a potential for submarine patents to cause problems for them (as happened with GIF).
The problem with replacing JPEG is the install base. Every graphical web browser since Mosaic has been able to view JPEG images. None can see your new standard (without a plugin). No existing image editors or cameras can generate your new standard (without an external program). Remember how difficult it was for PNG adoption, and that was with the threat of patent lawsuits for encoders.
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Look at the edges of the red and orange areas in the third image. The WebP version has some very nasty aliasing, and a line of black pixels inside the border.
Cheekily, most of the WebP sample images on the page linked in the summary are higher resolution than the jpeg images they're compared to.
From the selection of images link:
The tables on this page contain some sample images from Wikipedia. The photos are licensed under a Creative Commons License. Famous classic images such as Lena, the Baboon, etc., often used when doing compression comparisons, are unfortunately not free of copyright.
The main problem with new file formats is adoption. JPEGs have been the main image type online ever since the world realized that GIF sucked. Boards that allow image posting allow JPEG, social networks etc. which allow profile pictures allow JPEG, image search engines catalogue primarily JPEGs, almost every site's design utilises JPEGs. Offline it's the same; every OS which allows background images uses JPEG. Every image viewer and editor works with JPEGs. JPEGs have been an integral part of the internet for so long that I heavily doubt that any new format, superior or otherwise, will supersede them for a long time.
Great that you have read the article you apparantly did look at:
The photos are licensed under a Creative Commons License. Famous classic images such as Lena, the Baboon, etc., often used when doing compression comparisons, are unfortunately not free of copyright.
This is clearly not a troll.
I thought Playboy relented (just said the hell with it), and released Lenna (the head shot version) to public domain for research purposes?
Anyways, what people use to consider porn linked (now it seems like tasteful art :) ).:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
They didn’t put WebP images in a PNG container. They compressed them as WebP, decompressed them, and then saved the raw pixels as PNG. PNG itself is a lossless format, so any differences you see between the JPEG and the PNG were introduced by the WebP compression. The PNG image is also on an order of 10x larger than the JPEG, which is why it takes longer to download/render on your computer...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
apparently those are all generated from higher resolution source images
...which I downloaded. Here’s the difference between Cato June in JPEG and WebP, in full resolution, saved as a lossless PNG:
http://ompldr.org/vNXAxYQ/webp_vs_jpeg.png
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
JNG (JPEG + PNG transparency) has been available for nearly
10 years but was rejected by the people in charge at mozilla.
I've slowly become a fan of JPEG-2000. For those that don't know, JPEG-2000 lets you encode the largest image once, then download only the amount of file that you need for the image resolution that you're displaying. So those 5 or 6 different size versions of your vacation photos in a gallery and the thumbnail on a server can all come from the same file.
There are also far less artifacts at lower bitrates.
There are a few other technological tricks in JPEG-2000, but those are the major ones. Sadly, as you can tell by the name JPEG-2000 has been around for a long time, and doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Unlike PNG, which solved an essential problem for web development (and game development), JPEG-2000 merely does a few new tricks above JPEG.
All WebP seems to do is reduce file size. It's great to optimize, but I can't see a %40 reduction in file size on something that's trivially small for today's computers being enough impetus to change.
The ______ Agenda
Something suspiciously absent is any mentioning of license. I don't think it is necessary for me to describe why that's a problem.
See file LICENCE inside source package. It is 3-clause BSD licence.