Slashdot Mirror
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 can visibly see a difference in ALL the pictures. The WebP version is slightly murkier and less shows less detail than the JPEG version.
More accurately, WebP doesn't invent any additional detail. Look at the second image. Lots of artifacts on the background around his head. The WebP version is sharper, has less artifacts, and is a whopping 75% smaller.
Clearly WebP is especially good at photos with large areas of the same colour, something that JPEG has always been incredibly bad at.
If you already know which is WebP and which is JPG, you're unavoidably biased. We're not going to settle this without a blind trial.
Slashdot hackers! Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to write a little website which encodes a series of raw never-been-compressed images as WebP and JPG of equal sizes, presents both side-by-side to the user, and has them click on the one they think is "better". Do not label which image is which: randomize them. Collect statistics and present the data on the site.
Any good php hacker should be able to whip this up in about an hour. I'd do it, but I've got work to do.