Edit: apparently the date on the paper is 1/5/2006, I wonder why it's on their front page then :@

Stuffit, known to Mac users for it's series of archiving tools including Stuffit Expander, a tool that will unarchive most formats, has posted a white paper describing two new technologies for compressing images.

One of their new technologies allows users to compress JPEG images a further 20-30% without actually touching the image. This is based on the fact that JPEG processing is made up of two parts: first the image is compressed with lossy techniques, and it's then further compressed with a lossless compression. The output of this process is very random and incompressible by most archivers. To compress this any further, Stuffit simply decompresses the last lossless step of the image, and recompresses the half-compressed image data with a new, optimized algorithm.

The other new technique described involves compressing lossless 24-bit images. This technology can losslessly compress an image to about half the size of the same PNG or TIF image, which is quite impressive.

Both new implementations will be available in the form of Stuffit 9, Stuffit Image and in the future may be incorporated into devices such as digicams, DSLR cameras, phones, and readers such as picture frames and TV box thingies.

The paper can be browsed through here and is quite interesting if you work with images.

(This post was last modified: 08/03/2008 05:55 AM by Ge64.)

Sounds interesting.  Would be good if it were backwards compatible (is it?) with current standards - otherwise, I would say that sort of compression is probably already available already (ie video compression).

Thanks for the info though!

What do you mean with backwards compatible? Lossless is lossless, so it can convert to and from any other lossless format. The JPEG compression replaces the original JPEG lossless part of the compression with a new algorithm, and this can be converted back to normal (readable) jpeg files again when unarchiving, but can't be read as is unless the device/program supports this new technology.

The paper makes it pretty easy to understand with diagrams etc.

Backwards compatible, as in, is the "new JPEG" viewable by existing JPEG viewers?  Same with the "new PNG".

The main issue is that if there's basically no support for the new formats, well...


I should read the paper - just not willing to download a PDF (might be big).

sounds very interesting indeed
waiting to see how it goes

あずみ Wrote:

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Backwards compatible, as in, is the "new JPEG" viewable by existing JPEG viewers?  Same with the "new PNG".

The main issue is that if there's basically no support for the new formats, well...


I should read the paper - just not willing to download a PDF (might be big).

a big pdf?  ive gotten whole books that are less then 1meg... actually the I Am Legend book is a pdf that's only like 600 some kb.. but it has only one pic and that's the front cover

Yeah, text is small.
You can also get things only a few pages long (PDF) that are like ~10MB...

has it been released yet?

(This post was last modified: 09/03/2008 05:16 AM by Method.)