If you’ve been actively engaged with the internet, you might have noticed significant changes in its core elements like images and links over the past decade. The internet has become faster and more secure. One notable change has been in image formats, transitioning from WebP and AVIF to Jpegli, a new image coding library recently released by Google. So, what exactly is Jpegli, and why does it matter?
What is Jpegli?
Jpegli is Google’s new open-source JPEG coding library designed to significantly reduce the size of JPEG images while maintaining image quality and avoiding artifacts typically found in compressed images. The “li” at the end stands for “small” in Swiss German dialects.
This library is backward-compatible, allowing Jpegli images to be opened by programs that support JPEGs. It can reduce the size of a regular JPEG image by 35% and uses over 10 bits per component, unlike traditional JPEG coding solutions that offer only 8 bits per component. Additionally, Jpegli is more efficient.
Compared to WebP, Jpegli offers faster and higher-quality compression, helping to save storage space and speed up the loading times of web pages.
How Does Jpegli Work?
Jpegli achieves higher compression without compromising quality through four key techniques: Adaptive Quantization, Improved Matrix Selection, Precise Calculations, and Optional Advanced Colorspace.
The primary reason for the mediocre quality of fixed quantization in JPEGs is their use of adaptive quantization. In simpler terms, this means adjusting which elements in an image need to be retained based on image regions. This process reduces noise, retains details, and achieves a compression rate of 35%. Jpegli borrows this feature from another popular open-source library called JPEG XL.
Google refers to this technique as “Spatially modulating the dead zone,” based on psychovisual modeling from one of its projects called Butteraugli. This project helps estimate similarities between two images and how they are perceived by assigning them a scalar score and plotting a spatial map of the differences.
In Google’s tests, Jpegli outperformed traditional coding libraries like Mozilla’s MozJPEG and libjpeg-turbo. In simpler terms, this means Jpegli can compress images more efficiently than other coding platforms.
What Does Jpegli Mean for the Web?
Currently, the web has largely embraced WebPs. To illustrate the difference between WebP and Jpegli, think of WebP as a suitcase and Jpegli as an upgraded duffel bag. The suitcase enables you to store images neatly folded, preserving maximum quality, but it might not be recognized by all porters.
On the other hand, Jpegli is an improvement over the old duffel bag (JPEG). It uses intelligent techniques to compress files while remaining recognizable by porters (existing JPEG viewers). Put simply, WebP is a type of image format, whereas Jpegli is a tool used for encoding and decoding images in the JPEG format.
Will the web start using Jpegli soon? Probably not, as it has already embraced WebPs. However, expect Jpegli to be utilized in various image formatting tools that offer compression functionality. Parts of the web still using JPEGs could adopt Jpegli to speed up web pages, but for the foreseeable future, WebPs will likely dominate web assets.
JPEGs could potentially benefit from Jpegli’s encoding, but we might not notice the difference since the images would still be in JPEG format. In contrast, the WebP image format is likely to remain popular because of its versatility, supporting the compression of PNGs, animated images, and alpha transparency.
What do you think about Google’s new Jpegli coding library? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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