Free Lossless Image Format

Last updated

Free Lossless Image Format
FLIF.svg
FLIF encoder.png
Filename extension
.flif
Internet media type
image/flif
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) public.flif
Magic number FLIF
Developed byJon Sneyers and Pieter Wuille
Latest release
FLIF16
Extended to FUIF, JPEG XL [1]
Open format?Yes
Website flif.info
FLIF, reference implementation
Initial release3 October 2015;7 years ago (2015-10-03) [2]
Stable release
0.3 / 28 April 2017;5 years ago (2017-04-28) [3]
Repository
Website flif.info   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF) is a lossless image format claiming to outperform PNG, lossless WebP, lossless BPG and lossless JPEG 2000 in terms of compression ratio on a variety of inputs. [4]

Contents

FLIF supports a form of progressive interlacing (a generalization of the Adam7 algorithm) with which any partial download (greater than couple hundred bytes [5] ) of an image file can be used as a lossy encoding of the entire image.

Jon Sneyers, one of the developers of FLIF, since combined it with ideas from various lossy compression formats to create a successor called Free Universal Image Format  [ Wikidata ] (FUIF), which itself was combined with Google's PIK format to create JPEG XL. As a consequence, FLIF is no longer being developed. [1]

History

The format was initially announced publicly in September 2015, [6] with the first alpha release occurring about a month later, in October 2015. [2]

The first stable version of FLIF was released in September 2016. [7]

Design

For compression, FLIF uses MANIAC (Meta-Adaptive Near-zero Integer Arithmetic Coding), a variant of CABAC where the contexts are nodes of decision trees which are dynamically learned at encode time.

FLIF uses the reversible YCoCg color space [8] (unlike Y′CBCR that loses some color information to rounding errors, independently of its use in otherwise lossy JPEG). Not yet implemented are some features, [9] e.g. other "color spaces (CMYK, YCbCr, ...)". The color space conversion is faster, but the overall decoding (and encoding) is still slower than it needs to be, or some of the competition, even with the better color space as that is only a small fraction of the overall process. The format supports an optional alpha channel (RGBA) like PNG (but unlike JPEG); and progressive coding, similar to PNG (unlike it, progressive compression doesn't increase file-size), but as FLIF's algorithm is more complex (and partly, may not have had as much tuning of the implementation yet), it has a higher computational cost; at least lower bandwidth requirements can offset some of that extra time. Progressive coding reduces FLIF's performance.

FLIF supports grayscale, RGB and RGBA with color depth of 1 to 16 bits per channel. [8]

FLIF has some tuning parameters which can result in differently sized images. All of the images are still lossless. A flifcrush tool is also available to achieve the minimal size.

Lossy compression can be achieved by preprocessing. The process is deterministic and does not cause generation loss.

Support

UGUI-FLIF UGUI FLIF screenshot.png
UGUI-FLIF

XnView supports FLIF since version 2.36. [10]

ExifTool supports reading and writing metadata in FLIF images since version 10.31. [11]

UGUI-FLIF supports preview and converting PNG file to FLIF. [12]

IrfanView supports reading FLIF images since version 4.52. [13] [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JPEG</span> Lossy compression method for reducing the size of digital images

JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality. Since its introduction in 1992, JPEG has been the most widely used image compression standard in the world, and the most widely used digital image format, with several billion JPEG images produced every day as of 2015.

JPEG Network Graphics is a JPEG-based graphics file format which is closely related to PNG: it uses the PNG file structure as a container format to wrap JPEG-encoded image data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lossy compression</span> Data compression approach that reduces data size while discarding or changing some of it

In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size for storing, handling, and transmitting content. The different versions of the photo of the cat on this page show how higher degrees of approximation create coarser images as more details are removed. This is opposed to lossless data compression which does not degrade the data. The amount of data reduction possible using lossy compression is much higher than using lossless techniques.

Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy. By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Portable Network Graphics</span> Family of lossless compression file formats for image files

Portable Network Graphics is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) — unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym "PNG's not GIF".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Image compression</span> Reduction of image size to save storage and transmission costs

Image compression is a type of data compression applied to digital images, to reduce their cost for storage or transmission. Algorithms may take advantage of visual perception and the statistical properties of image data to provide superior results compared with generic data compression methods which are used for other digital data.

An Image file format is a file format for a digital image. There are many formats that can be used, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Most formats up until 2022 were for storing 2D images, not 3D ones. The data stored in an image file format may be compressed or uncompressed. If the data is compressed, it may be done so using lossy compression or lossless compression. For graphic design applications, vector formats are often used. Some image file formats support transparency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XnView</span>

XnView is an image organizer and general-purpose file manager used for viewing, converting, organizing and editing raster images, as well as general purpose file management. It comes with built-in hex inspection, batch renaming and screen capture tools. It is licensed as freeware for private, educational and non-profit uses. For other uses, it is licensed as commercial software.

A camera raw image file contains unprocessed or minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, a motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner. Raw files are named so because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed, viewed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter in a wide-gamut internal color space where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a viewable file format such as JPEG or PNG for storage, printing, or further manipulation. There are dozens of raw formats in use by different manufacturers of digital image capture equipment.

JPEG XR is an image compression standard for continuous tone photographic images, based on the HD Photo specifications that Microsoft originally developed and patented. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is the preferred image format for Ecma-388 Open XML Paper Specification documents.

FastStone Image Viewer is an image viewer and organizer for Microsoft Windows, provided free of charge for personal and educational use, as of version 7.0. The program also includes basic image editing tools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Progressive Graphics File</span> File format

PGF is a wavelet-based bitmapped image format that employs lossless and lossy data compression. PGF was created to improve upon and replace the JPEG format. It was developed at the same time as JPEG 2000 but with a focus on speed over compression ratio.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ExifTool</span> Software

ExifTool is a free and open-source software program for reading, writing, and manipulating image, audio, video, and PDF metadata. It is platform independent, available as both a Perl library (Image::ExifTool) and command-line application. ExifTool is commonly incorporated into different types of digital workflows and supports many types of metadata including Exif, IPTC, XMP, JFIF, GeoTIFF, ICC Profile, Photoshop IRB, FlashPix, AFCP and ID3, as well as the manufacturer-specific metadata formats of many digital cameras.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WebP</span> Type of image file format

WebP is an image file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency.

Better Portable Graphics (BPG) is a file format for coding digital images, which was created by programmer Fabrice Bellard in 2014. He has proposed it as a replacement for the JPEG image format as the more compression-efficient alternative in terms of image quality or file size. It is based on the intra-frame encoding of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video compression standard. Tests on photographic images in July 2014 found that BPG produced smaller files for a given quality than JPEG, JPEG XR and WebP.

JPEG XT is an image compression standard which specifies backward-compatible extensions of the base JPEG standard.

JPEG XL is a royalty-free raster-graphics file format that supports both lossy compression and lossless compression. It is designed to outperform existing raster formats and thus become their universal replacement.

AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an image file format specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF container format. It competes with HEIC, which uses the same container format built upon ISOBMFF, but HEVC for compression. Version 1.0.0 of the AVIF specification was finalized in February 2019.

The Quite OK Image Format (QOI) is a specification for lossless image compression of 24-bit or 32-bit color raster (bitmapped) images, invented by Dominic Szablewski and first announced November 24th 2021.

References

  1. 1 2 "Notice for JPEG XL". 12 April 2020. Retrieved 19 January 2021.
  2. 1 2 "Release v0.1-alpha". FLIF-hub/FLIF. 3 October 2015.
  3. ↑ "Release v0.3". FLIF-hub/FLIF. 7 June 2017.
  4. ↑ "FLIF is a New Free Lossless Image Format That Raises the Compression Bar". PetaPixel. 2 October 2015. Retrieved 20 October 2016.
  5. ↑ "Image compression race: PNG Adam7 vs FLIF (time: 0:00)". 6 September 2015. Retrieved 19 January 2021.
  6. ↑ "Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF)". 6 September 2015. Archived from the original on 12 September 2015.
  7. ↑ "Release v0.2". FLIF-hub/FLIF. 22 September 2016.
  8. 1 2 "FLIF16 Specification". flif.info. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
  9. ↑ "YCoCg Heuristics · Issue #258 · FLIF-hub/FLIF".
  10. ↑ Pierre-Emmanuel Gougelet (8 November 2016). "XnView 2.39". XnView . Retrieved 15 September 2017.
  11. ↑ Phil Harvey (19 October 2016). "ExifTool Ancient History". ExifTool . Retrieved 1 November 2017.
  12. ↑ "UGUI: FLIF Download". flif.info. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
  13. ↑ Irfan Skiljan (12 December 2018). "History of IrfanView Changes/Versions: [4.52 current 2018-12-12]" . Retrieved 28 December 2018.
  14. ↑ Kuki Dent (13 December 2018). "IrfanView 4.52 has been released today -IrfanView Support Forum" . Retrieved 28 December 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.