BPG Image Format

by tosh • 4 years ago

83 35 4 years ago

I thought HEVC already came with a way to encode images (HEIF)? I don't have any experience in this space so I am probably missing something obvious, but I thought HEVC technology was being used for images for a while.

dividuum2• 4 years ago

The release date makes the difference: BPG is from 2018, HEIF is from 2020. At least that's the official standard release date according to Wikipedia.

JonathonW• 4 years ago

HEIF was finalized in 2015 and was standardized by ISO in 2017; not sure where you're getting a 2020 date from.

It's been in widespread real-world use since at least 2017, when HEIF support was added to the built-in camera app in iOS 11.

FrozenVoid• 4 years ago

JPEG2000 looks better to me, these new "videoframe" formats are blurry at higher compression levels and lose detail.

aidenn02• 4 years ago

Indeed, I was looking at encoding black-and-white manga, and I dialed in the quality knob based on "Is the text crisp" "Are cross-hatching textures reasonably preserved" and "Lack of visible artifacts around the edges."

I then compared the file sizes and JP2K won hands down. It also had the advantage of already being supported in PDF, so I can just bundle them up into a PDF for relatively[1] easy reading.

[edit]

Someone pointed me to "Squoosh" and AVIF (which was still very experimental when I previously ran the tests; there was only a single encoder I could find, it took forever and crashed a lot) seems to win over JP2K; a quick estimate makes it look about 30% smaller (My first test image showed up at almost 50% smaller when I tuned it, but experience tells me that I need some padding if I'm just going to point it at a large directory tree).

1: A few PDF readers have failed to properly render the JP2K pages, but modern poppler and muPDF based readers both seem to handle it fine.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

I suppose that's what happens with a format originally designed for video --- things that wouldn't be noticeable in a split-second frame but increase compression are valued, whereas in a still image format, it's to be avoided.

kstrauser• 4 years ago

"Yes, yes, another image format by... oh, Fabrice Bellard. Alright, tell me more."

AbacusAvenger• 4 years ago

I swear, the guy must be a genius.

eunikefra• 4 years ago

Nothing wrong with it, but at first I thought BPG starts with Bellard

Dylan168072• 4 years ago

Well yes but no. It's a container but not a compression method.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Fabrice Bellard is Mozart when most of us can only hope to be Salieri.

WithinReason• 4 years ago

Comparison of this with some more formats (BGP is basically HEIF):

https://eclipseo.github.io/image-comparison-web

dopa42365• 4 years ago

There's also https://squoosh.app/ by google for comparison.

aidenn02• 4 years ago

No JPEG-2000 though?

TechBro8615• 4 years ago

Title needs a (2018)

throwaway190712• 4 years ago

But how is it pronounced?!

altairprime• 4 years ago

Bay-PEG, of course.

CharlesW2• 4 years ago

"Throatwobbler Mangrove".

cs702• 4 years ago

A natural question I've pondered from time to time is whether Fabrice Bellard is really a time traveler from a more advanced civilization in the future, sent back in time to show us, mere mortals, what humankind will be capable of in the future.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that he has created not only BPG, but FFMPEG, QEMU, LibBF, SoftFP, TinyEMU, a software implementation of 4G/LTE, a PC emulator in Javascript, the TCC compiler, TinyGL, LZEXE, a tiny program for computing the biggest known prime number, and NNCP, a clever lossless data compression system using deep neural networks (transformers, to be precise). And that's just a partial list of his successful projects.

Any of these projects, on its own, would be considered a notable achievement for an ordinary human being.

Source: https://bellard.org

CharlesW2• 4 years ago

I found his Wikipedia entry interesting as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

mark-r2• 4 years ago

You forgot my favorite - JSLinux, Linux running in your browser.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

The comment did mention PC emulator in JavaScript.

...and he has also written a JS interpreter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20411154

eternityforest• 4 years ago

We should have a programmer's hall of fame for people like this!

api• 4 years ago

There really aren't enough awards or halls of fame in our field.

m-p-3• 4 years ago

The Hall of Fame should have his name.

nix23• 4 years ago

https://bellard.org/mersenne.html

Absolutely astonishing!! A bit like the Bobby Fisher of programming ;)

mdp2021• 4 years ago

This just proves how the following has happened without many noticing:

Fabrice Bellard has released an Artificial Neural Networks library, LibNC, "C Library for Tensor Manipulation" ( https://bellard.org/libnc/ ). Similar to PyTorch, but in sheer C.

It's the library behind that data compressor mentioned: we do not just have the compressor, he gave us the very AI tool. If that does not make one ecstatic... Summary of features:

* C API ; * Small library, no external dependency, available for Linux and Windows ; * Define-by-run automatic differentiation engine (same idea as PyTorch) ; * High performance for both CPU (x86) and GPU (CUDA support). Optimized support of float32 and bfloat16 data types ; * CPU backend optimized for inference and small batch sizes ; * Optimized for online learning (i.e. simultaneous evaluation and training) using LSTM or Transformer models ; * Fully deterministic: return the same results at each run ; * Reproducible results (CPU backend only): return the same results regardless the CPU brand and OS

black3r• 4 years ago

discussion about this from 2014, when it was brand new and HEIF didn't exist yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704629

mark-r2• 4 years ago

And here's another discussion from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587684

Has the patent situation changed any since then? I wouldn't expect so.

btrettel• 4 years ago

Where did Fabrice Bellard work before 2012? I'm interested in seeing how he funded his work over time.

edward• 4 years ago

Can we stop using the Lena image please.

sally1620• 4 years ago

I cannot figure out if Bellard’s creations are hobby projects or serious production libraries. This one has a couple of issues: browsers have already settled on AVIF. And HEVC is patent encumbered which makes it not a good choice for deploying on devices.

ksec• 4 years ago

I wonder if he will update it when x266 is out.

I remember one of the thing we expected to happen with asm.js ( Now Wasm ) was we could swap any new image format decoder. So we could have rapid iteration of image codec. This hasn't happened though.

BPG Image Format

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