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by ArchStanton 1722 days ago
Imagine how small the file would be if it were a couple of for loops. Compression can take advantage of the colors of adjacent/near by pixels, adjacent pixels in time (for video), less bits for more common situations, removing differences that are invisible, etc.

Gotta ask. Has anyone worked on image compression using machine learning? (that sounds like an obvious thing to do). It would be funny to end up with an algorithm no one understands.
3 comments
cwp 1722 days ago
Yup. Consider that all compression boils down to some form of a model that can predict the next bits of information, and then an encoding that only includes the deviation of the actual data from the prediction. Machine learning gives us new ways of making predictions.
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ArchStanton 1722 days ago
I'll have to look into it.

Given both the financial value of image compression (given the amount of video shoved down the net) and the asymmetry of codec (it's OK to use resources to compress, not so much for decompress), I'd expect some real money to be spent in this area.

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NavinF 1722 days ago
> Has anyone worked on image compression using machine learning?

Dunno about the state of the art, but pretty much every ml tutorial has a section titled "Image Compression Using Autoencoders" right at the beginning. It's the Hello World of ml. The perceptual quality vs file size curve for such a simple network is pretty mediocre, but I'm sure you could do better if that was your goal.

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sgtnoodle 1722 days ago
A lot of old video games with impressive graphics were implemented sort of like that. Rather than storing bitmap data, the algorithm to render the artwork would be executed on the fly. It was actually faster than doing otherwise, since hard drives were so slow and the algorithm itself could fit in ram.

Tangentially related is the crash bandicoot game on the playstation. The developers figured out that untextured polygons were way faster to draw than textured polygons, and so they made the player character model out of tons of tiny colored polygons rather than fewer larger textured polygons. The result was a significantly better looking graphic for the same rendering time.

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