Beyond OpenEXR? A Novel Approach to Lossless Compression of Floating-Point Images

2025-07-14

ArasP delves into lossless compression techniques for floating-point images, particularly those with multiple channels. He benchmarks OpenEXR (including the new HTJ2K codec), JPEG-XL, and a custom method based on Mesh Optimizer. Results show OpenEXR with ZIP compression is practical, while HTJ2K offers slightly better compression but worse performance. JPEG-XL achieves higher compression ratios but is significantly slower. Surprisingly, the custom method using Mesh Optimizer and zstd outperforms others in both compression ratio and speed, emerging as a compelling alternative for floating-point image compression.

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Development

Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering on a Playdate: A Tale of Optimization

2025-02-22

This post details the author's attempt to implement surface-stable fractal dithering on the Playdate handheld, a device with a 1-bit monochrome screen. The process proved challenging due to the limited hardware capabilities. The author meticulously documents the journey, including implementing perspective-correct texture mapping, displaying brightness on a 1-bit screen, and optimizing the fractal dithering algorithm itself. Through numerous optimizations, including algorithmic simplification and switching from a half-space rasterizer to a scanline rasterizer, the author achieves a frame rate of 20-22 FPS, but acknowledges further improvements are possible.

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