🚀 go-pugleaf

tyen@cs.utexas.edu (Anthony Yen) writes:
> I was just talking with a friend of mine today, and he asked about the
> market viability for a package that scales down JPEG format 24-bit or 32-bit
> pictures to 16-bit or 8-bit depths. ... He countered that the package could
> make it in the market if it used the results of some multi-million dollar
> government-sponsored Los Alamos project which focused on how to compress
> high-quality images with little or no data loss.  ...
> Could someone please confirm or refute the possibility of such a piece
> of software?

What your friend is talking about is not data compression in the usual
sense; it is color quantization, and it is HIGHLY lossy.  The name of the
game is to make a visually acceptable approximation to a full-color image
within the constraints of a color-mapped display.  (Incidentally, reduction
for 15- or 16-bit direct-color displays has little to do with reduction for
8-bit color-mapped displays.)

I believe the Los Alamos algorithm referred to is the one used by the
commercial package "Fast Eddie" for Macintosh systems.  Fast Eddie is a
single-purpose program for 24-to-8-bit color quantization.  The blurbs I've
seen for Fast Eddie make great claims for its speed and the quality of the
resulting images, but I have not seen any independent evaluations.

If the underlying research was indeed done at Los Alamos, its results are
probably public domain.  Does anyone know where more information about the
algorithm might be obtained?  I would love to try it out for possible
inclusion in the free JPEG software.

				regards, tom lane
				organizer, Independent JPEG Group

PS: No, I don't think your friend would be well advised to try to build a
commercial color quantizer, but not because there is no demand.  Rather
because (a) there are lots of good free ones, and (b) the demand is within
larger software packages, not as a stand-alone product.  Too bad there is no
functioning marketplace in software components yet...

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