Ultrafast 2x lossy audio/image compression algorithm? - compression

I'm looking for an audio or image compression algorithm that can compress a torrent of 16-bit samples
by a fairly predictable amount (2-3x)
at very high speed (say, 60 cycles per sample at most: >100MB/s)
with lossiness being acceptable but, of course, undesirable
My data has characteristics of images and audio (2-dimensional, correlated in both dimensions and audiolike in one dimension) so algorithms for audio or images might both be appropriate.
An obvious thing to try would be this one-dimensional algorithm:
break up the data into segments of 64 samples
measure the range of values among those samples (as an example, the samples might be between 3101 and 9779 in one segment, a difference of 6678)
use 2 to 4 additional bytes to encode the range
linearly downsample each 16-bit sample to 8 bits in that segment.
For example, I could store 3101 in 16 bits, and store a scaling factor ceil(6678/256) = 27 in 8 bits, then convert each 16-bit sample to 8-bit as s8 = (s16 - base) / scale where base = 3101 + 27>>1, scale = 27, with the obvious decompression "algorithm" of s16 = s8 * 27 + 3101.) Compression ratio: 128/67 = 1.91.
I've played with some ideas to avoid the division operation, but hasn't someone by now invented a superfast algorithm that could preserve fidelity better than this one?
Note: this page says that FLAC compresses at 22 million samples per second (44MB/s) at -q6 which is pretty darn good (assuming its implementation is still single-threaded), if not quite enough for my application. Another page says FLAC has similar performance (40MB/s on a 3.4GHz i3-3240, -q5) as 3 other codecs, depending on quality level.

Take a look at the PNG filters for examples of how to tease out your correlations. The most obvious filter is "sub", which simply subtracts successive samples. The differences should be more clustered around zero. You can then run that through a fast compressor like lz4. Other filter choices may result in even better clustering around zero, if they can find advantage in the correlations in your other dimension.
For lossy compression, you can decimate the differences before compressing them, dropping a few low bits until you get the compression you want, and still retain the character of the data that you would like to preserve.

Related

Image compression Operations without edges blurring

I'm looking for some image compression operations, preferably simple in nature, that provide moderate compression ratios while preserving the edges in the images.
Please note that algorithms like JPEG which pack multiple operations are not applicable (unfortunately).
If you're using numpy, I suggest you take a look at the scipy.misc.imsave method
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy-0.14.0/reference/generated/scipy.misc.imsave.html
You can easily store your data in png without any loss and with compression ratios along the ranges you mentioned in your comment, e.g.,
rgb = np.zeros((255, 255, 3), dtype=np.uint8)
rgb[..., 0] = np.arange(255)
rgb[..., 1] = 55
rgb[..., 2] = 1 - np.arange(255)
imsave('/tmp/rgb_gradient.png', rgb)
Edit after comment 1:
It is really difficult to answer this question because of the lack of specifics.
Retaining a compressed version of the image in memory will certainly slow down your processing, as you will either need to decode and encode relevant parts of the image in each operation, or you'll need to use very specific algorithms that allow you to access and modify pixel values in the compressed domain (e.g., http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/232097/).
Now, to answer your question, the simplest way I can think is to use Huffman coding (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/greedy-algorithms-set-3-huffman-coding/) and store the codewords in memory. You will probably need to encode groups of pixels together so that each byte of codewords results in more than one pixel (and hence you could have any real compression). Otherwise, you'd need to find a way to efficiently pack small codewords (say 2 or 3 bits) together, which will certainly hinder your ability to read and write individual pixel values.

Drawing audio spectrum with Bass library

How can I draw an spectrum for an given audio file with Bass library?
I mean the chart similar to what Audacity generates:
I know that I can get the FFT data for given time t (when I play the audio) with:
float fft[1024];
BASS_ChannelGetData(chan, fft, BASS_DATA_FFT2048); // get the FFT data
That way I get 1024 values in array for each time t. Am I right that the values in that array are signal amplitudes (dB)? If so, how the frequency (Hz) is associated with those values? By the index?
I am an programmer, but I am not experienced with audio processing at all. So I don't know what to do, with the data I have, to plot the needed spectrum.
I am working with C++ version, but examples in other languages are just fine (I can convert them).
From the documentation, that flag will cause the FFT magnitude to be computed, and from the sounds of it, it is the linear magnitude.
dB = 10 * log10(intensity);
dB = 20 * log10(pressure);
(I'm not sure whether audio file samples are a measurement of intensity or pressure. What's a microphone output linearly related to?)
Also, it indicates the length of the input and the length of the FFT match, but half the FFT (corresponding to negative frequencies) is discarded. Therefore the highest FFT frequency will be one-half the sampling frequency. This occurs at N/2. The docs actually say
For example, with a 2048 sample FFT, there will be 1024 floating-point values returned. If the BASS_DATA_FIXED flag is used, then the FFT values will be in 8.24 fixed-point form rather than floating-point. Each value, or "bin", ranges from 0 to 1 (can actually go higher if the sample data is floating-point and not clipped). The 1st bin contains the DC component, the 2nd contains the amplitude at 1/2048 of the channel's sample rate, followed by the amplitude at 2/2048, 3/2048, etc.
That seems pretty clear.

Check for similarity on different size images

I have a video source that produce many streams for different devices (such as: HD television, Pads, smart phones, etc.), every of them has to be checked within each other for similarity. The video stream release 50 images per second, one image every 20 milliseconds.
Lets take for instance img1 coming from stream1 at time ts1=1, img2 coming from stream2 at ts2=1 and img1.1 taken from stream1 at ts=2 (20 milliseconds later than ts=1), the comparison result should look something like this:
compare(img1, img1) = 1 same image same size
compare(img1, img2) = 0.9 same image different size
compare(img1, img1.1) = 0.8 different images same size
ideally this should be done real time, so within 20 millisecond, the goal is to understand if the streams are out of synchronization, I already implemented some compare methods (nobody of them works for this case yet):
1) histogram (SSE and OpenCV cuda), result compare(img1, img2) ~= compare(img1, img1.1)
2) pnsr (SSE and OCV cuda), result compare(img1, img2) < compare(img1, img1.1)
3) ssim (SSE and OCV cuda), resulting the same as pnsr
Maybe I get bad results because of the resize interpolation method?
Is it possible to realize a comparison method that fulfill my requirements, any ideas?
I'm afraid that you're running into a Real Problem (TM). This is not a trivial lets-give-it-to-the-intern problem.
The main challenge is that you can't do a brute-force comparison. HD images are 3 MB or more, and you're talking about O(N*M) comparisons (in time and across streams).
What you essentially need is a fingerprint that's robust against resizing but time-variant. And as you didn't realize that (the histogram idea for instance is quite time-stable, for instance) you didn't include the necessary information in this question.
So this isn't a C++ question, really. You need to understand your inputs.

Filtering 1bpp images

I'm looking to filter a 1 bit per pixel image using a 3x3 filter: for each input pixel, the corresponding output pixel is set to 1 if the weighted sum of the pixels surrounding it (with weights determined by the filter) exceeds some threshold.
I was hoping that this would be more efficient than converting to 8 bpp and then filtering that, but I can't think of a good way to do it. A naive method is to keep track of nine pointers to bytes (three consecutive rows and also pointers to either side of the current byte in each row, for calculating the output for the first and last bits in these bytes) and for each input pixel compute
sum = filter[0] * (lastRowPtr & aMask > 0) + filter[1] * (lastRowPtr & bMask > 0) + ... + filter[8] * (nextRowPtr & hMask > 0),
with extra faff for bits at the edge of a byte. However, this is slow and seems really ugly. You're not gaining any parallelism from the fact that you've got eight pixels in each byte and instead are having to do tonnes of extra work masking things.
Are there any good sources for how to best do this sort of thing? A solution to this particular problem would be amazing, but I'd be happy being pointed to any examples of efficient image processing on 1bpp images in C/C++. I'd like to replace some more 8 bpp stuff with 1 bpp algorithms in future to avoid image conversions and copying, so any general resouces on this would be appreciated.
I found a number of years ago that unpacking the bits to bytes, doing the filter, then packing the bytes back to bits was faster than working with the bits directly. It seems counter-intuitive because it's 3 loops instead of 1, but the simplicity of each loop more than made up for it.
I can't guarantee that it's still the fastest; compilers and especially processors are prone to change. However simplifying each loop not only makes it easier to optimize, it makes it easier to read. That's got to be worth something.
A further advantage to unpacking to a separate buffer is that it gives you flexibility for what you do at the edges. By making the buffer 2 bytes larger than the input, you unpack starting at byte 1 then set byte 0 and n to whatever you like and the filtering loop doesn't have to worry about boundary conditions at all.
Look into separable filters. Among other things, they allow massive parallelism in the cases where they work.
For example, in your 3x3 sample-weight-and-filter case:
Sample 1x3 (horizontal) pixels into a buffer. This can be done in isolation for each pixel, so a 1024x1024 image can run 1024^2 simultaneous tasks, all of which perform 3 samples.
Sample 3x1 (vertical) pixels from the buffer. Again, this can be done on every pixel simultaneously.
Use the contents of the buffer to cull pixels from the original texture.
The advantage to this approach, mathematically, is that it cuts the number of sample operations from n^2 to 2n, although it requires a buffer of equal size to the source (if you're already performing a copy, that can be used as the buffer; you just can't modify the original source for step 2). In order to keep memory use at 2n, you can perform steps 2 and 3 together (this is a bit tricky and not entirely pleasant); if memory isn't an issue, you can spend 3n on two buffers (source, hblur, vblur).
Because each operation is working in complete isolation from an immutable source, you can perform the filter on every pixel simultaneously if you have enough cores. Or, in a more realistic scenario, you can take advantage of paging and caching to load and process a single column or row. This is convenient when working with odd strides, padding at the end of a row, etc. The second round of samples (vertical) may screw with your cache, but at the very worst, one round will be cache-friendly and you've cut processing from exponential to linear.
Now, I've yet to touch on the case of storing data in bits specifically. That does make things slightly more complicated, but not terribly much so. Assuming you can use a rolling window, something like:
d = s[x-1] + s[x] + s[x+1]
works. Interestingly, if you were to rotate the image 90 degrees during the output of step 1 (trivial, sample from (y,x) when reading), you can get away with loading at most two horizontally adjacent bytes for any sample, and only a single byte something like 75% of the time. This plays a little less friendly with cache during the read, but greatly simplifies the algorithm (enough that it may regain the loss).
Pseudo-code:
buffer source, dest, vbuf, hbuf;
for_each (y, x) // Loop over each row, then each column. Generally works better wrt paging
{
hbuf(x, y) = (source(y, x-1) + source(y, x) + source(y, x+1)) / 3 // swap x and y to spin 90 degrees
}
for_each (y, x)
{
vbuf(x, 1-y) = (hbuf(y, x-1) + hbuf(y, x) + hbuf(y, x+1)) / 3 // 1-y to reverse the 90 degree spin
}
for_each (y, x)
{
dest(x, y) = threshold(hbuf(x, y))
}
Accessing bits within the bytes (source(x, y) indicates access/sample) is relatively simple to do, but kind of a pain to write out here, so is left to the reader. The principle, particularly implemented in this fashion (with the 90 degree rotation), only requires 2 passes of n samples each, and always samples from immediately adjacent bits/bytes (never requiring you to calculate the position of the bit in the next row). All in all, it's massively faster and simpler than any alternative.
Rather than expanding the entire image to 1 bit/byte (or 8bpp, essentially, as you noted), you can simply expand the current window - read the first byte of the first row, shift and mask, then read out the three bits you need; do the same for the other two rows. Then, for the next window, you simply discard the left column and fetch one more bit from each row. The logic and code to do this right isn't as easy as simply expanding the entire image, but it'll take a lot less memory.
As a middle ground, you could just expand the three rows you're currently working on. Probably easier to code that way.

compact representation and delivery of point data

I have an array of point data, the values of points are represented as x co-ordinate and y co-ordinate.
These points could be in the range of 500 upto 2000 points or more.
The data represents a motion path which could range from the simple to very complex and can also have cusps in it.
Can I represent this data as one spline or a collection of splines or some other format with very tight compression.
I have tried representing them as a collection of beziers but at best I am getting a saving of 40 %.
For instance if I have an array of 500 points , that gives me 500 x and 500 y values so I have 1000 data pieces.
I around 100 quadratic beziers from this. each bezier is represented as controlx, controly, anchorx, anchory.
which gives me 100 x 4 = 400 pcs of data.
So input = 1000pcs , output = 400pcs.
I would like to further tighen this, any suggestions?
By its nature, spline is an approximation. You can reduce the number of splines you use to reach a higher compression ratio.
You can also achieve lossless compression by using some kind of encoding scheme. I am just making this up as I am typing, using the range example in previous answer (1000 for x and 400 for y),
Each point only needs 19 bits (10 for x, 9 for y). You can use 3 bytes to represent a coordinate.
Use 2 byte to represent displacement up to +/- 63.
Use 1 byte to represent short displacement up to +/- 7 for x, +/- 3 for y.
To decode the sequence properly, you would need some prefix to identify the type of encoding. Let's say we use 110 for full point, 10 for displacement and 0 for short displacement.
The bit layout will look like this,
Coordinates: 110xxxxxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyy
Dislacement: 10xxxxxxxyyyyyyy
Short Displacement: 0xxxxyyy
Unless your sequence is totally random, you can easily achieve high compression ratio with this scheme.
Let's see how it works using a short example.
3 points: A(500, 400), B(550, 380), C(545, 381)
Let's say you were using 2 byte for each coordinate. It will take 16 bytes to encode this without compression.
To encode the sequence using the compression scheme,
A is first point so full coordinate will be used. 3 bytes.
B's displacement from A is (50, -20) and can be encoded as displacement. 2 bytes.
C's displacement from B is (-5, 1) and it fits the range of short displacement 1 byte.
So you save 10 bytes out of 16 bytes. Real compression ratio is totally depending on the data pattern. It works best on points forming a moving path. If the points are random, only 25% saving can be achieved.
If for example you use 32-bit integers for point coords and there is range limit, like x: 0..1000, y:0..400, you can pack (x, y) into a single 32-bit variable.
That way you achieve another 50% compression.
You could do a frequency analysis of the numbers you are trying to encode and use varying bit lengths to represent them, of course here I am vaguely describing Huffman coding
Firstly, only keep enough decimal points in your data that you actually need. Removing these would reduce your accuracy, but its a calculated loss. To do that, try converting your number to a string, locating the dot's position, and cutting of those many characters from the end. That could process faster than math, IMO. Lastly you can convert it back to a number.
150.234636746 -> "150.234636746" -> "150.23" -> 150.23
Secondly, try storing your data relative to the last number ("relative values"). Basically subtract the last number from this one. Then later to "decompress" it you can keep an accumulator variable and add them up.
A A A A R R
150, 200, 250 -> 150, 50, 50