For a while in the 1990's IFS (fractal) image compression was a serious competitor to JPEG.
Microsoft Encarta used it on the encyclopedia CD-ROM.
I don't know what happened to it. It was pretty slow to compress.
Microsoft Encarta used it on the encyclopedia CD-ROM.
I don't know what happened to it. It was pretty slow to compress.
Wavelets seem to be another perennial also-ran in the image compression space. They work. They have the odd useful property here and there. They just aren't as good for most purposes.
There can also be differences in terms of investment; if hypothetically there were 3 techniques with roughly equally-useful "final forms", but only one of them gets that investment, then it'll win because there's no reason to pour the additional effort into the other two.
That just sounds to me like what happened to it, although I can't say for sure - did it perhaps also have other things about it that would make it a problem to be running lots of concurrent fractal compressing processes on a server?
The odd thing about it though, was that it could upscale smoothly. A 320x200 source could be decompressed at 640x400, and it would sort of intelligently "fill in the gaps" on textures etc.
And you can always do fast initial compression on images needed immediately, and run background compression to replace them with the smaller versions.
but slow to compress is always relative to fast to compress, and fast is related to user expectations of speed which is calibrated to your competitor's speed, thus if something is slow to compress it will probably stay slow to compress even as its speed increases.
From what I've heard, licensing costs were significant.