Galfar's Lair » Image Formats

Block Compression, DXTC, And Imaging

Marek Mauder — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:12:55 +0000

Imaging supported DXT image/texture compression since one of the earliest releases. Quality of compressed images isn’t very high though (at least the compression isn’t too slow). For future Imaging versions I plan to ditch the current compression code and add a new one. To be precise, two new ones – fast and lower quality (still probably better than current Imaging’s compression), and slow and higher quality mode. Fast one will be based on Real-Time DXT Compression by Id Soft. I’m not decided on high quality one yet, but probably something like cluster fit algorithm from Squish library.

Mainly for testing purposes during implementation of these new methods, I want to create extension for Imaging that compares two images (original and one reconstructed from compressed original) and measures PSNR and some other quality metrics.

I’m also thinking of implementing DXT5 based format using YCoCg colorspace and PVRTC (texture compression currently used in iPhone).

Few links if you’re interested:

Brief DXTC overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression
More technical details: http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/texture_compression_s3tc.txt
YCoCg-DXT related: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/real-time-ycocg-dxt-compression.html

Here’s some quick comparison of DXT compressors (click the image to see full size). Value in brackets is MSE (mean square error) – lesser number means compressed image is more similar to original.

First JPEG 2000 for Pascal Release

Marek Mauder — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:18:39 +0000

I finally released first version of JPEG 2000 for Pascal library. It’s based on translated header and precompiled OpenJpeg library that was part of Imaging for a long time – now released separately.

There’s header translation working with both Delphi and FPC and original C library precompiled to object files (Delphi) and static libraries (FPC for Win32, Linux x86/x64, and Mac OS X).

I’ve written simple TBitmap descendant that loads and saves JPEG 2000 images. It’s only for Delphi now – can’t do LCL version with just few IFDEFS, there are lot more changes between VCL and LCL TBitmaps. I plan to write separate LCL version for one of upcoming releases (using TFPCustomImageWriter and TFPCustomImageReader classes).

You can get JPEG 2000 for Pascal library at it’s project page.

APNG Update

Marek Mauder — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:45:17 +0000

APNG loading and animating implementation for Imaging wasn’t very hard work. However, there are not that many test images to be found on the Internet and most of the available ones are very simple. They’re usually not using disposal methods and are basically just collection of independent images. Big difference compared to GIF files – some of them were quite difficult to animate right. I even got most of nontrivial APNG test files by converting some more complex animated GIF files. Tools for creating APNG images are not yet as sophisticated as some GIF animation tools – there’s GIF to APNG converter, APNG Anime Maker, and some web based tools that assemble simple APNG file from bunch of uploaded single PNG frames.

Now I’m gonna extend PNG saver to allow saving multi images to simple APNG files, much like MNG saving works now. There’s really not a good unified way how to pass some more information to image file savers in current library design – that’s one of TODOs for new Imaging architecture.

APNG Support for Imaging

Marek Mauder — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:32:30 +0000

I started working on support for APNG format for Imaging library. APNG is unofficial extension of PNG image file format created by two guys from Mozilla Corporation. The point of APNG is to allow storing simple animations in PNG files (hence the “A” for “Animated”).

There is already PNG-like chunk based format for animations called MNG (already supported by Imaging – at least the basic features). However, MNG is quite complex format and its support among browsers and image viewers/editors is lacking. Code library supporting all MNG features is huge.

APNG on the other hand is just an extension of PNG and its implementation is not so complex. I’m going to load only the raw frames from files at first and see what will have to be done to support animating the frames next. Canvas class will have to be used here for alpha blending subsequent frames to previous ones. I’ll add option to turn the animating on/off just like it is available for animated GIF files.

More info about APNG: http://www.animatedpng.com and https://wiki.mozilla.org/APNG_Specification.