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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.
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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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.
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.