BPG Image format
bellard.org
bellard.org
So we don't like HVEC due to patent worries? Fine, we can swap in another format and use the same technique.
We don't have an I-frame format for Daala that's finalized yet? Fine, we can use work-in-progress. The format does not need to be finalized. If you update it, you rebuild your images and bundle a new JavaScript decoder.
The ability to ship media along with a sandboxed, runnable decoder is awesome, and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on until now. I remember Google a while back implemented their own "video" codec in JavaScript using JPEGs and primitive inter-frame processing, exactly because there wasn't a universal video codec format they could use.
If only the rightclick menu could be customized by JS. Adding only a limited number of entries to the menu seems like it'd be okay.
Still, it is quite amazing.
the demos reminded me what browsing on dialup was like. in fact dialup was better cause at least the decoding/loading was progressive/incremental, which doesnt seem to be the case here. i assume it's just the way the decoder is implemented?
Not quite production-ready, I think.
Safari/iOS and Chrome/Android worked with no issue. Desktop Firefox also worked.
This is the software video decoder, by the way: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js
If this is the case, then putting in a hardware decoder would be a needless expense.
I believe that some browsers actually keep in RAM all the images uncompressed, that can acually be the reason that makes the potential for optimizations less obvious.
Very large images are fairly rare on the web. In particular phones don't have giant displays, so it's usually a waste of bandwidth to send a huge picture to a phone as part of a webpage. And, speaking only for mobile Firefox at the time I worked on it, we had lots of bigger problems with large images than decoding speed. For example, Firefox would keep the whole decoded image in memory while it was onscreen, even if it was only displaying only part of the image or only a downsampled version of the image. If it's a giant image, the decoded image could use up a large fraction of the device's memory.
I'm also not aware of any major phones with have GPGPUs -- I'm not an expert in this stuff, but I think you'd need that to get any serious acceleration from JPEG decoding.
If you needed this for any page that loaded lots of images, all of the above would significantly increase page-load time, and memory usage. Especially on a mobile browser, it would use more resources (hence more battery), than otherwise. So personally I wouldn't like to see this be the future. Maybe just as a fall back, but detection for that might be a little hard.
grabs all image urls of a page
checks which have .bpg extensions
replaces all these .bpg img tags with canvas tags
loads all the images with Ajax and renders them into the canvas tags
Right now, it would appear that the with a hard reload of the demo: http://bellard.org/bpg/lena.html on chromium, the BPG images are initially loaded with the page, then the posts.js file scans through the page's images to find the ones who's src ends in '.bpg', then posts.js re-downloads the same files with ajax, which are then decoded to PNG files rendered in canvas tags with no identifying information.
The extra request to re-download images is unnecessary but easily removed to just process the data loaded with the initial page load.
>> Can CSS reference them without javascript changing the styles?
Not from what I can see. The images are being rendered to canvas elements without any identifying information. The decoder will need to be modified to add identifying id's or classes. This again is an easy fix.
>> Can they be cached locally if downloaded directly?
This is what I perceive to be an issue. Try downloading the image rendered to the 5kb bpg example... The image that is being rendered is a 427.5kb PNG and that's for a 512x512 image size.
PNGs aren't lossy... so any difference in file size is going to be the product of rendering size or how much the bpg compression has simplified the source image. ( I'm guessing the file size follows something like a logarithmic curve where it jumps initially based on rendered image dimensions and then approaches a limit as the compression approaches lossless. )
Because of the rendered out PNGs' large file size, I would expect that if you are rendering out large images or a lot of images, you would definitely use more resources than with comparable quality JPGs regardless of whether you cache the BPGs for rendering and you would indeed experience the drawbacks you mentioned in both memory and page-load time.
That being said, this is a cool idea, an incredible proof of concept and I'm very thankful to Fabrice for putting it out there.
Are you sure you are not inspecting with the cache disabled. If the appropriate cache headers are applied, this shouldn't issue another request.
The only problem I see for now is SEO. Ofcourse the title and alt attributes can give some context but the images wont get indexed
Still, to become truly widespread you need to have support in all kinds of software out there, "everything you need is js plugin" is unreasonable optimism in my opinion. And, anyway, decoding using js isn't fast enough to be one and only solution forever, you need to get to have browser and other software support sooner or later, and for that you need 1 standardized format, not "whatever your plugin supports" as thread-starter suggests.
Google Animated doodle with JPEG and opacity
http://zoompf.com/blog/2012/04/how-do-google-animated-doodle...
Even the things he does just for fun are impressive. Have you ever booted up Linux inside your browser? http://bellard.org/jslinux/
> Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard.
So BPG is patent-encumbered, right?
tl;dr (obviously tl;dr): This format is very, very easy to implement despite the patent risk, simply by assuming that any device new enough to be considering including it will have already licensed the relevant patents.
Having alpha channel support, 14 bits and better compression would be lovely.
Would this have been less interesting or valuable if it hadn't been made by a hacker celebrity?
I would much rather someone revived the Fractal Image format, which is now out of patent. It's very expensive to encode, but that's nowhere near as big a problem as it used to be. It's very fast to decode, very small, and the files are resolution independent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression
I was blown away when I encountered it at PC Magazine in the 90s and it seems like it would be very responsive to the needs of today's web.
They have a 6-minute figure on their page. I wonder what modern hardware could do with it? Anybody care to give it a whirl?
In terms of optimizations we have SIMD and GPGPUs to make it even faster. Not unrealistic to think we could bring that 6 minute figure down to one second... And then, of course, there might be algorithmic tweaks that help us even more. Get 100 people looking at that code, and for sure they'd find ways to speed it up.
Without knowing how this scales with image size there is really no way to speculate about performance on modern hardware.
I remember looking at systems like that and drooling. Now the latest CPUs have 8MB L3 cache.
(And note my phrasing of "got more hype than was justified by its ability to perform"... it isn't that it has no ability, just that it got more hype than it should have. Same thing happened to "wavelets". Yes, I know about JPEG2000... again, the point isn't that they are "bad" or "can't work" but that they got more hype than their real performance justified.)
At the time, encoding required a) an expensive license and (IIRC) b) an accelerator board if you intended to do anything other than leave your CPU churning overnight - obvious disadvantages relative to formats like jpeg.
you should read the Talk page of the wikipedia entry, where it's obvious there are some misinformed/deceptive folks took control of the page. See the comp.compression FAQ is a much better resource, as is the paper Brendt Wohlberg and Gerhard de Jager, "A review of the fractal image coding literature", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 8, no. 12, pp. 1716--1729, Dec 1999 in particular " purely fractal-based schemes are not competitive with the current state of the art"
Unfortunately I can't find a free PDF at the moment.
http://pointersgonewild.com/2014/01/02/tile-based-image-comp...
Figure 2 absolutely does not contain the level of detail reproduced in the--supposedly--fractal compressed versions in figure 3 and 4.
http://justinmayer.com/bpg-test/
Size of PNG before conversion: 186K
Size after conversion to JPEG: 52K
Size after conversion to BPG: 9K
I took the liberty of submitting a Homebrew formula, so hopefully this will soon be a quick "brew install libbpg" away. (^_^)
I get "bpgdec.c:35:17: warning: png.h: No such file or directory" and lots of other errors.
When the file size gets larger at the end, it looks like there might be a little loss of detail. Ideally I'd like to compare them by switching back and forth using the original image and the .bpg as Photoshop layers...
Maybe I'm reading it wrong.
extension_tag ue7(32)
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'extension_tag' is the extension tag. The following values are defined:
1: EXIF data.
sRGB is designed for an 8 bit per channel encoding, so while it makes sense to support 10bpc to mitigate quantization effects of higher compression, it makes little sense to support more than 10bpc unless wider gamut spaces are supported. If the intent is for BPG to replace JPEG in-camera renderings, rather than converting existing JPEG and PNG to BPG, then it needs to support spaces other than sRGB. This doesn't require explicitly embedding ICC profiles but the spec needs to, well, specify at least one way of preserving this metadata. Otherwise there's no guidance for encoding or decoding the information, and then it's lost. And at that point it's a huge regression from what we have now, and thus no point in implementing it.
His accomplishments are impressive: QEMU, FFMPEG, TCC, JSLinux, the list goes on
I have been wishing there was a JPEG equivalent with an alpha channel for like forever. That allows better compositing to arbitrary background images or patterns. Now the question is how long before browsers might support it natively.
It's also supported natively on all newish (4.0+) Android devices and Chrome.
JPEG 2000 works in Safari. JPEG XR in IE. A gracefully-degrading JPEG XT is in the works: http://www.jpeg.org/jpegxt/index.html
Lossy PNG with alpha works in all browsers: http://pngquant.org (not equivalent in compression ratios, but still 4 times better than normal PNG).
Does anyone know if he has a day job or does he just lock himself away and work on these interesting projects?
Some of the HEVC algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries
There have been some patent disputes over JPEG, but I don't think replacing it with another possibly patented format is a good idea, even if it's technically superior in some ways.
I don't know if that suggestion makes much sense, but you missed it in your quote.
Royalties only get involved when distributing encoders & decoders.
See page 7 here http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Documents/HEVCweb.p...
But with h.264, _codec_ licensing is for non-commercial (and internal business) use only (page 8).
There's no clear statement that HEVC licensing is for any and all purposes, and their use of the term "End user" in MPEG-LA's (non-binding) public material across patent pools is quite inconsistent, so it may mean only non-commercial users.
Given that it's MPEG-LA that we're talking about here, and their history, I assume there will be nasty surprises unless there's hard evidence that there aren't.
Good times.
Edit: decoder, not encoder
But the vast majority of people right now don't have support for HEVC encoding and won't have for 5+ years.
I hope browser vendors take note. The patent issues are concerning, but if that can be worked around and a new spec designed, then we might just actually have a new image format for the web which really is better than what we've already got.
I'd really like to know that. Because I'd really like to use this.
The coolest thing is this javascript program that can decode and display the pictures on-the-fly.
Definitely an image format that could save storage space and bandwith, IMHO.
[1] http://x265.org
Yeah, who am I kidding, I'll just buy more hard drives to keep the originals :)
But you will note that none of those things are "in" Firefox. H.264 support in the <video> tag is implemented via platform-specific APIs (which, for example still don't work on OS X). DRM requires a CDM binary blob, which is again platform specific. You do not have the open-source freedom to port these features to some other platform that does not support them.
1. Why a Subset of HEVC Still Picture Profile? Why not just a use HEVC Picture instead?
2. Since JS sources are readable and being interpreted by VM ( Free Speech ), patents issues should not be a problem?
3. I am assuming the quality of BGP still has Lots and Lots improvement to be made? Since all H.265 encoder hasn't had the time to be tuned. ( Compared to x264 )
It gets to Lena's head in the first image, then becomes brigtly multi-coloured, though it looks like the difference between colours right... as if maybe an int overflow in the browser's JS implementation?
186,967 ==> 29,872 and indistinguishable, 6.25:1
(and pls tell me if it breaks on your browser - I want to push this live!!!)
adam
Your issue if anything will be older browsers. Is there a way that it can detect browser side if something has failed?
Edit: it's particularly noticeable in the wood grain patterns. Also, there's a soft grey dot to the left of the top of the lamp, 100px or so, that's entirely missing in the BPG. There are loads more examples...
Edit again: the color saturation of the rug is pretty washed-out as well.
why would you do this
I write this, because I am building such an application and for now it has many PNGs ... and yes, using a format like BPG would be fine, because I use the PNGs only because of transparency ... but when redisplay is done via a Java Script, I doubt that I could have the same speed. Loading is not so much a limiting factor, since after some time, all relevant PNGs are already in the browser cache.
Can anybody say something to this topic?
Of course, it would be great to have this integrated into the mayor browsers soon ...
BPG looks good upon cursory inspection. It seems to be more efficient than WebP and supports 42-bit color. It also has .png's features of transparency and lossless compression although I didn't see anything mentioned about animation to replace .gif.
Bonus: since it's based on h.265 hardware support will come naturally and should be just a software update for devices that already have HEVC capability.
As a bonus, you won't have to pay for a HEVC decoder license.
Assuming a fast C++ decoder instead,(possibly GPU accelerated if the decoding algorithm is well suited for it) and not using JS but what would be the rendering times?
PNG are 4x bigger in his experiments, but interlaced PNG makes it more pleasant to users since it can be rendered progressively, can BPG benefit from such a thing?
edit: Interlacing is also used in JPEG, isn't it ?
It's a tradeoff, as a user, it's obvisouly a win situation when we have a low bandwidth, and as a server it's obviously a win.
A C++ decoder with assembly optimizations could easily run four times as fast as the Javascript version. Unfortunately distributing it would not be possible due to patents.
Yes, and contrary to PNG it actually makes files smaller.
The problem with human judgement that it's very imprecise. You're unlikely to notice difference between JPEG at Q=90 and Q=95, but you can't say it doesn't matter, because that can cause 40% difference in file size. OTOH objective metrics can easily spot that.
"Looks the same to me" leaves a lot of room for error and you could be unfairly telling one format to save much more detail than the other. And almost by definition these are the details you're least likely to be able to see.
There's also a pitfall of choosing image that looks subjectively "nicer" rather than closer to the original. Codecs that are better (e.g. faithfully preserve noise) may be judged as worse than another codec that's an accidental Instagram filter.
I don't necessarily think JPEG is bad, or that it's even Tumblr's fault that I first thought to share photos there, but if any service/software started using BPG I think I would excitedly try it out.
[e.g. http://www.huddug.com/ vs https://www.flickr.com/photos/127341162@N03/15762469070/]
There are two really hopeful things about this new project: (1) by leveraging HEVC, we get cheap (energy efficient) and fast decode on future mobile devices and (2) Since he is demonstrating pretty quick decode in JavaScript now, it clearly isn't a CPU pig like JPEG-2000.
[0] http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...
The problem with the Lenna imagery isn't political correctness, it's the fact that it's a crappy scan from a magazine that always had crappy photography to begin with.
The problem is that women in science cannot read a paper on image processing without being reminded that it's a boy's club.
I find this attitude far more patronizing than any conceivable choice of test imagery in a graphics research project.
Suggest reading this before posting anything else about the delicate sensibilities of "women in science": http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/magazine/my-great-great-au...
Do you think any of those women would have spared a half-second's thought about this issue? Somehow, I don't think so. I think they were too busy doing science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Controversy
I'm not saying all women are crippled by it, because they have to deal with such nonsense while walking down the street every day. But can't we as scientists strive to improve the status quo?
The scientists in the article I linked, on the other hand, aren't speaking up about anything, because they're all dead.
The New York Times Magazine article is pretty long, it'll take you a few minutes to read it. I'll wait.
Short version: they suffered real discrimination, which you've diminished by comparing it to the use of Lenna.jpg in a graphics project.
Not doing something you are permitted to do is somehow denying their right to permit? It's nice of her permitting the use, however her permission doesn't force us to use it. By the same logic, it would be perfectly okay use goatse image if the guy permitted it, right?
If the ability to represent the goatse image were a critical part of the evaluation process for a compression algorithm, then yes. However, we evolved to recognize and respond to subtle features in human faces, not human colons. So, no, goatse would not be an appropriate reference image.
I have a hard time understanding the knee jerk reaction to the change and the willingness to maintain the status quo. We have nothing to lose if the image is swapped with one that is less ostracizing --which is something Mozilla did in the past. Why defend it?
So it wouldn't be worth defending at all, if it weren't being attacked on grounds I strongly disagree with, by people who I believe shouldn't gain any more influence over our culture than they already have.
...no wait, I wouldn't.
Is it putting words in someone's mouth if said words are their own, I wonder?
Are you even aware you made my exact point?
You, on the other hand, were suggesting that CamperBob2 was arguing with you purely because he didn't like you, which would be pretty silly if it were true.
I'm having trouble understanding what this means, concretely. Do you think it would be a bad thing if computer science became less of a boys club? Or do you not believe that is why people dislike the picture? Who is it exactly that has too much power over "our" culture -- women? Politically correct killjoys?
On the Internet it's hard to be sure, but I haven't seen any negative comments about lenna.jpg that I can attribute to women qua women.
So I guess that leaves door #2, huh?
Regarding the image itself, it's not even a good test image. There are far better images out there that test the robustness of image compression, but those test images haven't been ran though every image processing algorithm since the 1973. Should we change default test images? Yes, but Lena should still be used as well. The historical data it provides is invaluable.
This sounds a lot like Redskins argument.
> The source code for various compression algorithms may have been lost, but the encoded Lena results for that compression algorithm may very well still exist.
We need to compare a new algorithm to an obsolete one where we don't even have the source code and this is beneficial... how?
By the way, the image is remastered in 2013 so none of this is relevant anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Remastering
Yeah, sure, from a historical perspective, the situation is not exactly symmetrical, and if it helps with normalizing the situation, maybe Lenna should be banished ... but then again, I would think that if the atmosphere is right otherwise, I doubt anyone would really be bothered by the use of mildly erotic pictures where there is consent from the person in the picture?
Having said that, all those demo photos do look good. I was wondering how we were going to see a demo in the browser without built-in support, but leave it to the man who put Linux in the browser to write a decoder in javascript. This is an encouraging project.
If I were someone working on image compression techniques I would probably have seen many many algorithms and their output using that image so when I see a new algorithm and a new Lena, I might look at the results and think "Hey, this is similar to this other approach I am familiar with"
So many photos taken on any given day are photos of people, so it's simply not practical to eliminate a human subject from test images. If we're going to have an image of a human subject, that person is going to have to be somewhere on the gender spectrum. More data (images of two people) is preferable to no data (no images of people to avoid the risk of offending anyone)
In particular, the (appropriately-licensed) Kodak image set used in the Mozilla study includes multiple pictures of women, none of which are Playboy scans. The complaint is not that there's a picture of a woman, it is that _this_ particular picture keeps being used despite no particular scientific reason why it's optimal for comparing graphics formats.
Furthermore, why does the licensing matter? Near as I can tell every use of Lena, except for by a for-profit company, constitutes fair use. The image, every time I've seen it, has been used for non-profit educational work. It's never reproduced in its entirety. The use of the image for this image compression purposes has no impact on the original market for which the image was originally created. Does this not meet the requirements of fair use?
That all said, I agree that if their is a better images available for this purposes, those should be used as well, but that is an entirely separate issue from whether or not Lena should or should not be used. The happenstance provenance of the image is really the only controversial detail, and if we go back to the history of why it was used it was mere chance:
Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of
1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical
engineering at the University of Southern California Signal
and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), along with a graduate
student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the
lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference
paper. They got tired of their stock of usual test images,
dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the
early 1960s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good
output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. Just
then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of
Playboy.[0]
Anyways, I want to re-iterate my main point, which you did not address:
If I were someone working on image compression techniques I
would probably have seen many many algorithms and their output
using that image so when I see a new algorithm and a new Lena,
I might look at the results and think "Hey, this is similar to
this other approach I am familiar with"
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#History
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_%28literary_and_hist...
National Geographic has been printed in a format that is approximately have the surface area as Playboy. From a cursory search of NG covers from 1973, the images aren't the same quality as those achievable with studio photography equipment available at the time.
> It was just a historical accident, and contrary to what you claim, I do not believe there is a pressing reason to keep using the exact same image, it's merely a relatively unquestioned tradition.
Many people (including myself) do not believe there is a pressing reason to not keep using the exact same image. I do think there is good reason to publish research with additional test images including the Kodak set linked to above. "Dilution" of the image would achieve the same goal some are advocating here.
Lastly, I find the following heuristic valuable:
function hasValidOpinion(person) {
return person.hasPublishedContentInField();
}
The easiest way to break from this tradition is to produce novel research in the area of image compression and publish papers without using this image as a reference. Feel free to publish a paper without it if this matters so much. In the meantime, it's not really fair to be out there criticizing those who are from the comfort of your armchair.
We should not change it for the reasons I made in several sibling comments: we lose a common point of comparison.
You can dilute it's relevance by providing many alternative reference images for many algorithms and popularized those alternative reference images. No one in the field is going to complain about having more common reference images, but they sure as heck are going to see you as "book burner" if you trying to eliminate the one common image without first providing alternatives. Merely stating there are other lossless images is not sufficient. You need to provide those same images after having been processed with every relevant algorithm someone might need to know.
How about you start off by doing this work for Bellard. Take the Mozilla set, run them through BGP and send the images to Bellard for inclusion on his website. Enrich us. Don't make us poorer.
> The notion that only a person from the same field can have a valid opinion on this is frankly ridiculous. It's plainly ad hominem / argument from authority.
The notion that someone uninvolved can have an opinion and expect others to shoulder the burden of conforming to that opinion is even more ridiculous.
So everyone, please respond: Now that there's an "attractive" man in use for image testing, do you feel repulsed or discouraged that they would sexualize/objectify a man like that?
Do you feel pushed away from this industry?
Personally, this exercise is helping me see the light of the "are we treating women as delicate flowers who can't handle it" viewpoint. That image of Fabio is not threatening to me. Anyone who tries to tell me it is threaten, I think is being overly sensitive.
I'm utterly comfortable with people expressing this level of sexuality in the academic/public area. It's more akin to a "schoolkid crush" than to strip tease.
No matter how you feel about the image itself, though, there is value in continuing to use it... people are familiar with it, to the point of it becoming almost cliché. This takes the focus off of the image and subject and puts it squarely on the image algorithm.
That's the exact privilege you get to enjoy as a hetero male. You get to ignore things like this when your female colleagues (if you're lucky enough to work with any) have to look at the image and be reminded that many people continue to view them as objects.
- If I post a picture of a cute kitten, does it mean I look at a cat as an object? That I will only under-appreciate all animals because I liked a photo of one? - If I post a picture of my mother or father, am I objectifying them? - What if I take a picture of a street performer who's doing some awesome thing and post it... am I reducing them to simply an object of attraction?
I just said it didn't affect me one way or another... that it is just an image. If someone thinks this image means I view a woman as an object, they are projecting THEIR OWN ISSUES onto me. That is the ONLY way that it could be offensive, in that they are choosing to be offended by something that 99% of the population think nothing about.
If you have a picture of your parents on your desk, that's great and I respect your love for your family. If you keep using a crop of your mother from her Playboy centerfold in the '70s as a test case for your algorithms, and you encourage other scientists to use the same picture, I might be a bit weirded out.
And who wouldn't be! But that begs the question, is there a son or daughter of Lena Soderberg who is also a researcher or software engineer working in image compression algorithms?
Yes it does. geofft wants to imply that it is somehow equivalent of using a nude of one's own mother, which is absurd.
>Sexualizing women has nothing to do with ...
Tell me why you think this one[1] is okay, as opposed to the Lena image; and what it has to do with whatever it is you do.
[1] http://jeremykun.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/gala-dali.jpg?w...
You clearly do not understand how the context of an image matters in interpreting it.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah... The Lena image contains a nice mixture of detail, flat regions, shading, and texture that do a good job of testing various image processing algorithms. It is a good test image. It is used by thousands of researchers in the field since image processing was a field.
So, your image isn't "sexualization" because Dali and "fine art" ?
>You clearly do not understand how the context of an image matters in interpreting it.
You cannot articulate a difference between Lena and the Dali that doesn't rely upon subjective opinion.
Yes, there is such a thing as tasteful nudity, and pornography is generally not. This is why our society allows children into art museums but not strip clubs. What is so hard to understand about this? Context is subjective, but there are agreed-upon standards for professionalism. Just because the standard was different fifty years ago does not make it a good idea today. If you can't think of any "traditions" from fifty years ago that professional scientists unanimously agree are wrong today, then you're quite ignorant.
> Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah...
Clearly I am the one failing to articulate things.
Good think they don't. Or how are they?
How culturally normative of you.
Why? It's the picture and not the context. If it wasn't posted here on HN, it wouldn't have seen it.
>If you have a picture of your parents on your desk, that's great and I respect your love for your family. If you keep using a crop of your mother from her Playboy centerfold in the '70s as a test case for your algorithms, and you encourage other scientists to use the same picture, I might be a bit weirded out.
Do you know on how many portrait photos of your co-workers they wear pants? Do you think it is important they do? Also get weirded out, that's your problem. Do you know how many people get weirded out of you because you browse HN?
You don't have to be offended by the image. You don't even have to understand why people are offended, that's fine. But if you don't take other people's feelings into consideration, that's the inconsiderate part.
Other people are going to have different opinions than you do. Telling other people they're not allowed to be offended is why you're an asshole.
Edit: just take another look at the cropped picture "Lena". If your argument is that that is somehow offensive, you are wrong, plain and simple.
I would be an inconsiderate asshole if the picture was actually offensive, ie, if it was goatse, someone in blackface, etc. But it isn't, and unlike you, I have the courage to make a statement about the image: that it is objectively not offensive. There is no one out there who is actually offended by it. They are all people pushing an agenda.
So your argument seems to be that because some people could be offended by it, we shouldn't use it, even though the notion that anyone could be offended by it is ridiculous on its face. So what, then, about things like gay pride parades? People can be offended by those, too. According to your argument, we should end that, too. But I'm sure you'd never advocate for that. You'd say something like "it's their right to be in your face in public". And of course it is, even though it can offend people. But that same argument defends people who'd use offensive images in image processing papers, not just ones which are just a target for politically correct assholes. You only care about people being offended if they're on your side.
Gay pride parades are not bad things, and just the same, a woman posing for Playboy is not a bad thing, and using the cropped image of the face of a woman's nude picture is even less offensive than a gay pride parade. And nobody should be pressuring anyone to stop either of those things.
Of course I'm going to attack that. Women are required to be beautiful or they are deemed worthless, or failures. So they put a lot of work into it from a fear of failure. Men can be beautiful too, especially to a woman's eye which you've never seen through. If men were made to worry about their appearance as much as women, we'd be "fair" too.
I am truly sad for you if that is the case in your enviroment, but please, please do not generalise like that.
I find your comment a bit strange. I am an heterosexual male and I find this picture utterly uninteresting from a sexual point of view. To me, the appeal of using this pictures is sheer seventies nostalgia... I'm too young to have been alive in 1973 but I'm old enough to remember gawking in awe at the wall of the computer room adorned with output from the first desktop color printer I ever heard of or the first laser printer I ever saw. The example picture used was Lena. The picture reminds me of old computer rooms... I don't even know who the model is and I don't even find her pretty.
By all means use a better picture... But when a Hello World moment is required on a printer, this one is a very strong contender.
http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...
http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/kodim04.html
The fact that you call the uncropped image "pornographic" (which, yes, it technically is) when Playboy centerfolds are rather tame by modern standards kinda hints at the real problem here: the boring old American prudishness that has been masquerading as feminism as of late. I sincerely could not care less if Bellard had used Billy Herrington's toned ass as a test subject. The sooner that our society can get past this ridiculous fear of sexuality and the human body, the better.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Bellard is from France, a culture much more accepting of nudity and sexuality than ours. I would not be surprised if he had simply not considered the possibility of prudes across the pond getting outraged over such an innocuous thing.
This is not a matter of prudishness. I would be totally fine (see my other comment in this thread) if researchers used both male and female crops, but they don't. So to make your point you need to show me all of the male French researchers who are accepting of male nudity in their image processing research. I would be very surprised if you could find me a single one.
>This is not a matter of prudishness.
There seems to be a contradiction here.
>I would be very surprised if you could find me a single one.
I agree, not because I think male French researchers would give a rat's ass about the cropped head of a naked guy appearing as a test subject, but because I doubt any would be foolish enough to poke the proverbial hornet's nest and incur the wrath of self-righteous west coast white guys tweeting on their iPhones.
And now you're saying that French researchers don't care, but they do because they don't want to anger Americans? (And somehow they're all white, live on the west coast, and have iPhones?) What a crazy web you're weaving.
You mean this one? "Sexualizing women has nothing to do with image processing research." How positively libertine of you.
>You're missing the point
And you're missing my point, which is that if you really weren't a prude, you wouldn't care either way. Straight men like pretty women, straight women like handsome men, gay men like handsome men, gay women like pretty women, some people like some combination of the above, some guys 40 years ago liked a pretty woman, who gives a fuck? Stop being offended by extremely tame displays of sexuality.
>And now you're saying that French researchers don't care, but they do because they don't want to anger Americans?
You city slickers don't seem very good with jokes, do you?
I'd tell you to "lighten up" but I forgot that's code for "long live the patriarchy."
I open a women's magazine and see photographs of... women.
These magazines exist because people are buying them. WOMEN are buying them. I don't see many men on the editorial boards of these womens' magazines, pushing for more attractive women in the magazine in ever-more-scantily-clad garb.
What do I conclude, other than that a lot more attention seems to be being "naturally" paid to women in general, especially in a superficial context?
What do I make of the fact that more than double the number of women are bisexual, than males are? And thus, a significantly higher percentage of people of all sexes find the female form interesting?
Women: The cause of, and solution to, all the world's sexism
Getting the equivalent for all other papers involves getting the source code for all the other papers, and running those algorithms against these other images and making those images easily discoverable by someone who might come across these other papers (they are unlikely to contain links to your newly generated set).
What you're essentially advocating is reducing the available comparative evidence in an entire field of study because some people object to its origin, many of which don't even work in this field of study.
I'm sorry, but when you can't even admit that eliminating this image from use might have negative consequences from a utility point of view, it makes it very hard for others to accept your position.
Losing a common point of comparison in a field of study working on optimization problems is a step back. If you advocate for "diluting" the image by getting other reference images in common use by practitioners, then I can back that up. That approach actually balances the concerns of both sides and generally enriches the field (more common reference images can only serve to aid in objective and subjective comparison)
Create a site with all the different image formats out there with a larger test set.
Be willing to take matters into your own hands and change the norms and traditions in that field of study. The best way to accomplish that is by offering something better. I would say that a wiki with many test images for many algorithms is something better. If you do an good job, people will adopt your approach and tradition will change. Complaining on HN isn't going to change tradition.
Introducing new ideas usually is usually more successful long-term approach than "book burning" because you disagree with the content.
Disappointing, but unsurprising, to see HN defending the use of literal pornography in a professional setting. I thought we moved past the Ruby on Rails jerks defending porn in a professional setting as harmless fun.
Dianne O'Leary, distinguished university professor emerita in UMD's CS department, objects to it: https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/oleary/faculty/node8.html
Sunny Bains, senior teaching fellow at UCL, also objects (see page 6): http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/pcs_mirror/may_june01.p...
written by this woman: https://twitter.com/Love2Code
Maybe you can't generalize the opinions of two people to 50% of the human race?
ANTSANTS' anecdotal evidence serves as a counterpoint to your anecdotal evidence, but you know what they say, the plural of anecdotes is not data. Instead you may want to work from a statistically significant sample size when making your point. If not, don't be surprised when people discount any conclusions you have made based on anecdotes.
No, I'm not. I'm asking: "I'm curious if you're basing this belief on actual information from the people in question, or just your intuition about what they probably think." If he's got statistically stronger evidence than my anecdotes (which are more than two, but yes, still anecdotes), I'd love to hear it! If not, I'm curious what other evidence or argument he has for the claim he made.
Try a different strategy: offer a better alternative that makes it so practitioners not only don't notices the loss of Lena in common usage, but instead overwhelmingly favor alternatives. Create a better product.
Alternatives exist, and AFAIK Lena is just used as a "canonical" example to use as a nice picture (like the Zachary Karate Club network).
FTFY
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_S%C3%B6derberg
[2] http://dimka-jd.livejournal.com/3673381.html (NSFW)
All this is incredibly unimportant. You just made me waste 60 seconds of my life on a pointless thing and i want them back.
Also, looking at the other comments, the fact that you happen to be fine with that image is neither here nor there. It certainly doesn't cancel out the fact that I'm not.
You are either subtly trolling, or have an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance going on here. You both objectify her by using those adjectives ("beautiful, young") AND THEN go on to state that use of a female model is sexist. Is use of a well-dressed male model sexist? If not, then your entire PREMISE is, in fact, sexist! Not to mention this photo is ENTIRELY asexual. Are you suggesting we avoid use of human models entirely to dodge sexism? Good luck with that.
Well, so much for that. Executing code in order to view an image is just begging to be exploited…
What's needed is a compression method that doesn't introduce artifacts on hard edges, as JPEG does, but is otherwise no worse at compression than JPEG. Then we wouldn't need to do some things in JPEG and others in PNG, and we'd be spared the pain of JPEG screenshots. Much better results on the Tecnick image set (which is mostly hard edges) would indicate one had been found. The results only indicate modest improvement in that area.
JPEG 2000? JPEG XR? Wavelets tend to produce softness instead of ringing or noise.
The improvement is far from marginal. In particular:
... I just tried to link you to a BPG image, and discovered that I can't.
Well, I'm going to ignore that little flaw for the moment, because that's just a browser feature. If BPG catches on, that's sure to change.
Anyway, the improvement is far from marginal: http://a.pomf.se/cdywsc.png
In particular, look around her face, eyes, and the background. The JPG is not just worse, but in fact very worse.
A more serious flaw is that it doesn't support animation. It doesn't need to be a video format. It just needs to be able to play a sequence of frames in succession. This is as easy as including a header that specifies how many frames are in the animation and the duration of each frame, followed by the image data itself. The fact that PNG doesn't have this has plagued the format since the internet became popular.
That may seem like "a video format," but it's not. Video decoders optimize for inter-frame compression, not intra-frame compression, so it's a different problem altogether. BPG doesn't need to do everything, but it should probably have basic animation.
Open these two images in a separate browser tab, then switch back and forth between them:
Those are the upper images of the test. Also try these, the lower images:
Again, JPG is not merely worse, but very worse. In fact, JPG makes it look like she's wearing a hat that's made of crosshatch material at the top, when in fact the top is composed of rings of fiber, not crosshatch.