Fractal Image compression, will significantly speed up your web surfing | ||||||||
FIC is not a new thing, the idea has been around for quite a while. The idea is to not compress the pixel data, but rather to figure out how the picture is self-similar at different scales, and to remember the transforms.
Goal
I am aiming to write a fractal image compressor and decompressor that work in a reasonable timeframe on modern computers.
Good and Bad?
The traditionally limiting factor for FIC is the compression time, several hours for one fullscreen image.
There hasn't been much appeal for FIC, or much of a push for developing the technology.
The really cool thing about FIC is that decompressing is very quick and very simple, and the file size is very small, maybe 5 - 50KB for a full screen image, compared with maybe 200Kb for a jpeg image. (These are just estimates!)
Development
I use a 1GHz cpu for my main development box, and I am already compressing 128x84 image sizes in a few seconds.
Let me know if you are interested in developing a standard for fractal image file format or are interested in sharing ideas about how to optimize fractal image compression techniques.
I hope to have some sample images here soon so that you can see some progress.