Show HN: SplatHash – A lightweight alternative to BlurHash and ThumbHash

by unsorted2270 • 5 months ago

61 19 5 months ago

Hi HN,

I built SplatHash. It's a lightweight image placeholder generator I wrote to be a simpler, faster alternative to BlurHash and ThumbHash.

Repo: https://github.com/junevm/splathash

k2xl• 5 months ago

Thanks for sharing. I didn’t even know this type of thing had multiple algorithms.

Can you share what are the reasons someone may want to compress and image to 16 bytes?

lifthrasiir2• 5 months ago

These things are called Low-Quality Image Placeholders (LQIP) and frequently used for front-end performance engineering.

montroser2• 5 months ago

For image placeholders while the real image is loading. At 16 bytes, that can easily be just another attribute on an html img tag.

Dwedit2• 5 months ago

I've seen the alternative where you make a tiny JPEG file (discarding the huffman and quantization tables), and use that as the placeholder. Just glue the header and tables back on, and let the browser handle JPEG decoding and stretching. It's not as small as 16 bytes, but the code for handling it is fast and simple.

The trick of using common huffman and quantization tables for multiple images has been done for a long time, notably Flash used it to make embedded JPEGs smaller (for when they were saved at the same quality level).

lifthrasiir2• 5 months ago

Interesting, but my testing suggests that SplatHash is very weak at preserving global features, at least for synthetic images [1]. Both BlurHash and ThumbHash were able to preserve most of them, at the expense of worse (but still non-zero) local feature reproduction, but SplatHash simply discarded all global features! I guess you need to store both local features (Gaussian splats) and global features (cosine bases) for the best result. The currently unused padding bit might be useful for that...

[1] I used my own avatars and icons as a test set. For example, https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/323836?s=400&v=4

unsorted22703• 5 months ago

definitely, will take a look

therealdeal2020• 5 months ago

so you turn images into colored bubbles? Why do people use this?

esafak• 5 months ago

For privacy preservation and progressive revelation.

liamwire• 5 months ago

Inline it into a website's HTML to provide a low-res preview of an image as opposed to a blank placeholder or layout shift.

corysama• 5 months ago

As a game engine dev, if I have an asset management app, it’s pretty reasonable that it might load the list of asset names and hashes before doing the significant work of decoding/generating thumbnails. This could give the app instant low quality thumbnails from loading the tiny array of data that’s already necessary just to get started.

Groxx• 5 months ago

Say you're a photo archiving app, and want to quickly show people something in their thumbnails when they fling back several years and tens of thousands of photos, into an area you haven't cached locally yet.

At 16 bytes per image, you can use this for even gigantic libraries with only a few megabytes. It becomes reasonable to just download and keep it all in memory at all times, so you can always show something vaguely representational instantly, rather than nothing but thousands of identical empty boxes. Often this is just a small nice-to-have bit of visual flair, but it can be useful too: I've been happy to have it when I was looking for moon pictures I knew I had taken, on a slow network, and they were super obvious to scroll to without having to wait for hundreds/thousands of thumbnails to download to find the right area. Instead I immediately found the dozen-ish I wanted and only had to download those to figure out the exact file I was looking for. (they're pretty easy to spot when you have a dozen that all look kind of similar in a row, compared to a whole bunch of things with wildly different colors for the rest of the week)

You can do similar things for showing placeholders on images in a website: it's so small you can just keep it right on the database row, and it won't be a performance or space concern on essentially any database, even for millions of users.

montroser2• 5 months ago

Very cool. To my eye, the splats are sometimes having too much contrast -- implying more "stark" visual features that don't actually manifest in the real image. Presumably the radius and the opacity curve of the gradients can be tuned to taste at the decoding phase, to make the splats softer?

unsorted22703• 5 months ago

adding to my roadmap

GaggiX• 5 months ago

The 6 blobs of colors look very weird after testing a few images, I feel like ThumbHash is much more natural and the downsides are minimal compare to SplatHash.

Dwedit2• 5 months ago

One other thing to compare it against is actual tiny JPEGs.

When you save a series of images as 16x16 JPEGs at the same JPEG quality level without optimization, you notice that there is a whole lot of common data between those files. Common data includes things like the file header (FF D8, FF E0 blocks), the Quantization tables, and the Huffman tables. If you cut away all the common data, the actual size of the image data is extremely tiny, usually under 64 bytes, though not a fixed size.

Here are the sizes of the four example images (just the unique image data) when resized to 16x16, then saved at quality 20:

First image: 48 bytes

Second image: 42 bytes

Third image: 31 bytes

Fourth image: 35 bytes

After appending back the 625 bytes of common data, you end up with a regular JPEG that can be decoded and displayed using fast native code from the browser.

ThumbHash page includes a comparison against "Potato WebP" which is probably a similar idea.

unsorted22703• 5 months ago

will add this to the roadmap too

joshu• 5 months ago

this is cool. i built something similar a while back using wavelets and matching pursuit in a similar manner but with a different goal; i wanted to make an image compressor that had different visual effects when the file format was glitched. here are some examples of it moving variance from the original above to the compressed image below: https://youtube.com/shorts/f2pZyZNXY0Q?si=HXf14pOs9DaAk7MZ https://youtube.com/shorts/-LIALRpU63o?si=p_MiFnT8MMX0C0b4

swaminarayan• 5 months ago

How does SplatHash compare to BlurHash and ThumbHash in terms of visual fidelity vs byte size at the same target length?

geooff_• 5 months ago

This is super cool! I'm wondering what applications typically look like? Send a little hash like this along with a big image to show while decompressing?

Show HN: SplatHash – A lightweight alternative to BlurHash and ThumbHash

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