[HN Gopher] Compressing Images with Neural Networks
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       Compressing Images with Neural Networks
        
       Author : skandium
       Score  : 47 points
       Date   : 2024-03-17 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mlumiste.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mlumiste.com)
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | It is not going to take off if it is not significantly better,
       | and has browser support. WebP took off thanks to Chrome, while
       | JPEG2000 floundered. If not native browser support, maybe the
       | codec could be shipped by WASM or something?
       | 
       | The interesting diagram to me is the last one, for computational
       | cost, which shows the 10x penalty of the ML-based codecs.
        
         | dinkumthinkum wrote:
         | I think it is an interesting discussion, learning experience
         | (no pun intended). I think this is more of a stop on a research
         | project than a proposal; I could be wrong.
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | Did JPEG2000 really flounder? If your concept of it being a
         | consumer facing product as a direct replacement for JPEG, then
         | I could see being unsuccessful in that respect. However,
         | JPEG2000 has found its place in the professional side of
         | things.
        
           | esafak wrote:
           | Yes, I do mean broad- rather than niche adoption. I myself
           | used J2K to archive film scans.
           | 
           | One problem is that without broad adoption, support even in
           | niche cases is precarious; the ecosystem is smaller. That
           | makes the codec not safe for archiving, only for
           | distribution.
           | 
           | The strongest use case I see for this is streaming video,
           | where the demand for compression is highest.
        
             | dylan604 wrote:
             | But that's like saying it's difficult to drive your Formula
             | 1 car to work every day. It's not meant for that, so it's
             | not the car's fault. It's a niche thing built to satisfy
             | the requirements of a niche need. I would suggest this is
             | "you're holding it wrong" type of situations that isn't
             | laughable.
        
               | yccs27 wrote:
               | There was absolutely an initiative to make J2K a
               | widespread standard
        
             | actionfromafar wrote:
             | Huh, one more point for considering J2K for film scan
             | archiving.
        
         | geor9e wrote:
         | The thing about ML models is the penalty is a function of
         | parameters and precision. It sounds like the researchers
         | cranked them to max to try to get the very best compression.
         | Maybe later they will take that same model, and flatten layers
         | and quantize the weights to can get it running 100x faster and
         | see how well it still compresses. I feel like neural networks
         | have a lot of potential in compression. Their whole job is
         | finding patterns.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | How do we know we don't get hands with 16 fingers?
        
       | jfdi wrote:
       | Anyone know of open models useful (and good quality) for going
       | the other way? I.e., Input is a 800x600 jpg and output is 4k
       | version.
        
       | holoduke wrote:
       | How much vram is needed? And computing power? To open a webpage
       | you soon need 24gb and 2 seconds of 1000 watts energy to
       | uncompress images. Bandwidth is reduced from 2mb to only 20kb.
        
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       (page generated 2024-03-17 23:00 UTC)