Fractal compression
Fractal image compression is a method for lossy compression of digital images, wherein the self-similarity in the images is used.
In 1988, Michael F. Barnsley and Alan D. Sloan, the theoretical foundations of fractal image compression, the first implementation came, however, from Barnsley, Arnaud Jacquin PhD in 1992.
Principle
The idea is based on a particular type of fractals, the attractors of iterated function systems (IFS). Here complex pictures with a lot of affine transformations of the image are created in himself.
Simple examples are ferns or clouds. Addiction is a particular feature of the cloud out, so you will always find a spot that this is very similar, and is just a bit larger, rotated, bright or compressed.
In order to construct an arbitrary image, a set of faces ( ) must be sought which, when combined, cover the entire image, in pairs but may not overlap. For each of these areas a different area must be found in the image that looks similar as possible to that surface. It can transformations such as contrast and brightness adjustments, rotation, scaling, ..., be undertaken.
Note that the contents of the areas is greater than the content of the space.
The search for the smallest possible set of such surfaces with the associated parameters for imaging is extremely complex.
The reconstruction of an image is performed in loops. It is started with an arbitrary image of the target size. Then all the images are performed. The result is an image that looks something similar to the searched image. These calculations are repeatedly performed until no further improvement is possible.
Fractal Image Format ( FIF)
Fractal image format has been developed by Iterated Systems graphics format, which is based on fractal image compression and was aligned against JPEG. Despite some advantages, such as significantly better scalability and slightly higher quality at the same file size, the format has failed, despite some minor successes. Some of the reasons were that neither Netscape nor Microsoft were willing to implement the format into their browser, plug-ins off the Win32 platform were not available ( apart from Windows was initially the display not possible) and files in this format at first to work only with a relatively expensive tool of the company were iterated. Still today, many graphics programs to be able to decode FIF graphics at least. However, the plug-in to display with Netscape or Internet Explorer is no longer officially available today. On the FTP servers of some universities the latest version 1.6 of the Fractal Viewer plug-in can still be found and also works with the latest versions of Netscape, Opera and Internet Explorer together correctly. It is able to display FIF graphics as full screen or scale within the website.