Image size increases after loading - c++

I have an RGB JPEG image which weighs about 11 MB and its resolution 7680 x 4320. I use an array of uchar4 to store it in the RAM. sizeof(uchar4) is 4 bytes, which is logical. It is not hard to calculate that the size of the array I use will be 4 x 7680 x 4320 = 132710400 bytes = [approx.] 126 MB. So how comes that the image weighs only 11 MB when it's stored on the hard drive and weighs 126 MB after being loaded into the RAM.

So actually your question is why is the image size smaller when it is stored on disk because the size in memory is actually what you expected, right?
Unfortunately you did not tell us which file format is used to store the image, but basically all common image formats don't store the pixel values as-is. They apply a compression algorithm first. Some formats like PNG or GIF use lossless compression, others like JPEG use lossy compression which means that image quality gets slightly worse whenever the image is stored. However these formats allow a better compression.
All compression algorithms depend on the fact that image pixels are not (statistically) independent from each other. Nearby pixels are usually correlated. This correlation is used to reduce the amount of data. Because different images typically have different correlations, the image file size can vary even if the number of pixels is the same.

Related

What is the raw form of a compressed image file format(jpeg, PNG , gif)?

As we know jpeg , PNG , gif are all compressed file formats, my question is what is the original source of input we provide to these compression algorithms and in which form a image data is stored before it gets converted into one of these file formats.
That depends.
PNG is generally lossless, but it does have a limit on the number of bits/pixel. GIF turns out to be lossless, too, but it is more complicated to get a high number of colors. These formats are still compressed, but use a compression that doesn't lose data.
JPEG is lossy. If you save as a JPEG, you will not be able to revert back to another format without losing some clarity. By representing the data as equations it can get quite small, but it can start to look "blurry" as the approximations get worse.
There are other images formats, like TIFF, RAW and BMP, which generally don't do any compression, although they are really more like containers and technically can contain compressed data, but they usually don't.
The original, uncompressed, data depends on what generates it. A photoshop file will save as a PSD but internally may represent it differently in memory. Every digital camera may have a different way of laying out its internal memory, and the photo sensors tend to map 1 to 1 from a sensor to a memory location of a set number of bits.
The common pattern, however, is that each pixel of the image is stored as 3 (sometimes 4) color values, each one between 8 and 16 bits. The 3 values may represent Red, Green and Blue, or alternatively Hue, Saturation and Value. For design, it could be CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK). There could also be an alpha value. It's unusual to use more than 16 bits for each color channel and most common to use 8. Using 12 bits is considered by most to be full color, but that doesn't align very well on 32 bit or even 64 bit machines. Still, 12 bit is used sometimes in digital video signals since when broadcast serially the color values don't need to fit into words.
Different formats will go in a different order. Usually rows first, but some formats start at the bottom row and some start at the top.
So, the real answer is it depends on what the particular compressor is looking for. Most software that saves as JPEG or PNG will accept multiple formats and the most common is probably 32bit/pixels with 8 bytes each for RGB (red, green, blue) and one either unused or alpha. It will need width and height of the image so the image data should be width*height*4 in bytes. You generally pass in a defined constant that tells it the byte order: RBGA, ARGB, BGR, RGB, etc.

How to compress sprite sheets?

I am making a game with a large number of sprite sheets in cocos2d-x. There are too many characters and effects, and each of them use a sequence of frames. The apk file is larger than 400mb. So I have to compress those images.
In fact, each frame in a sequence only has a little difference compares with others. So I wonder if there is a tool to compress a sequence of frames instead of just putting them into a sprite sheet? (Armature animation can help but the effects cannot be regarded as an armature.)
For example, there is an effect including 10 png files and the size of each file is 1mb. If I use TexturePacker to make them into a sprite sheet, I will have a big png file of 8mb and a plist file of 100kb. The total size is 8.1mb. But if I can compress them using the differences between frames, maybe I will get a png file of 1mb and 9 files of 100kb for reproducing the other 9 png files during loading. This method only requires 1.9mb size in disk. And if I can convert them to pvrtc format, the memory required in runtime can also be reduced.
By the way, I am now trying to convert .bmp to .pvr during game loading. Is there any lib for converting to pvr?
Thanks! :)
If you have lots of textures to convert to pvr, i suggest you get PowerVR tools from www.imgtec.com. It comes with GUI and CLI variants. PVRTexToolCLI did the job for me , i scripted a massive conversion job. Free to download, free to use, you must register on their site.
I just tested it, it converts many formats to pvr (bmp and png included).
Before you go there (the massive batch job), i suggest you experiment with some variants. PVR is (generally) fat on disk, fast to load, and equivalent to other formats in RAM ... RAM requirements is essentially dictated by the number of pixels, and the amount of bits you encode for each pixel. You can get some interesting disk size with pvr, depending on the output format and number of bits you use ... but it may be lossy, and you could get artefacts that are visible. So experiment with limited sample before deciding to go full bore.
The first place I would look at, even before any conversion, is your animations. Since you are using TP, it can detect duplicate frames and alias N frames to a single frame on the texture. For example, my design team provide me all 'walk/stance' animations with 5 pictures, but 8 frames! The plist contains frame aliases for the missing textures. In all my stances, frame 8 is the same as frame 2, so the texture only contains frame 2, but the plist artificially produces a frame8 that crops the image of frame 2.
The other place i would look at is to use 16 bits. This will favour bundle size, memory requirement at runtime, and load speed. Use RGBA565 for textures with no transparency, or RGBA5551 for animations , for examples. Once again, try a few to make certain you get acceptable rendering.
have fun :)

How can I compress jpeg image with compression rate 4 bpp or less?

I am trying to compress my .jpeg image in Photoshop.
WHat is the best way to do this?
I am now calculating the bpp taking the image size in kb, calculating how many bits that is. Then I take the image size in pixel*pixel to get the amount of pixels in the image. After that I divide bits/pixels, to find how many bits per pixel the image has.
But How can I change this number? My guess is to change how many kb the image is, but how do i do this?
Thanks for any help!!
Yes, you can achieve higher compression ratio than 4 bits per pixel. Images with solid color can have rate as low as 0.13bpp.
In fact 4bpp is quite poor compression — it's same as uncompressed 16-color image or half of 256-color image, which even GIF can manage. JPEG can look decent at 1-2bpp.
in general, you cannot "compress" a jpeg image. all you can do is to reduce the image quality further in order to achieve a lower bpp value. jpeg streams are always compressed and they use a lossy compression method. it means that the original image will never ever be reconstructed from a jpeg image. the smaller the file the more information you have lost.
a specific "bpp value" is not, and should never be your target. especially with lossy compression. you should always look at your current image and decide whether it is still good enough or not.
if you still have the original image, try a lossless compression format, like zip-compressed or lzw-compressed tiff or compressed png. i'm sure PhotoShop can handle these formats as well. another softwares like IrfanView (https://www.irfanview.com/) or XnView MP (https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/) will convert your images too.
if you want manual (eg. full) control over your images, you should use command line utilities, like ImageMagick (https://imagemagick.org/) or NConvert (please find the XnView MP link above)
if you have only the jpeg images do not touch (edit & save) them. with every single save operation you lose another bunch of information. you should always work on file copies.
you should always keep your master image (the very picture you took with your phone or your camera).
of course, these rules of thumb will not answer your original question.

Writing 10,12 bit TIFF files with LibTIFF C++

I'm trying to write 10,12 bit RGB TIFF files with LibTIFF.
The pixel data is saved locally in an unsigned short buffer (16bits)
1) If I set TIFFTAG_BITSPERSAMPLE to 10 or 12, not enough bits are being read from the buffer, and the output is incorrect. (I understand that it is just reading 10 or 12 bits per component, instead of 16 and this is the problem)
2) I tried packing the bits in the buffer, so that it is really 12-R, 12-G, 12-B. In this case, I think the file is being written correctly but no viewer I could find could display this image properly.
3) If I set TIFFTAG_BITSPERSAMPLE to 16, viewers can display the TIFF image, but then I have a problem that I don't know if the image was originally 10 or 12 bits (If I want to later read it with LibTIFF). Also, the viewer expects the dynamic range to be 16 bits and not 10 or 12, also resulting in a bad view.
4) The most annoying part is that I couldn't find one 10, 12, or 14 bit TIFF image on the web to see what the header is supposed to look like.
So finally, what is the proper way to write 10 or 12 bit Image data to a TIFF file ?????
The TIFF specification does not specify a way to store 10, 12 or 14 bits per channel in an image. Depending on the encoder and decoder, it may still be possible to work with such images, but it is effectively an implementation detail, as they are not required to do this.
If you want more than 8 bits of precision in a TIFF, your only choice is 16 (or floating point, but that's a different story).
I'm not aware of any image format with specific support for these bitdepths, so viewers will likely be a problem anyway if you must store the image with that specific bitdepth. The simplest workaround I can think of would be to just store as 16 bits per pixel and put the original bitdepth as metadata (e.g. in an ImageDescription tag), but it all depends on what the images will be used for and why you need this information.
You can store the image as a multi-image file. For example, with a 12 bit source, one image would be an RGB(8) image using the upper 8 bits and a second 16bit gray scale that was a combination of the low four bits and four bits of padding. This gives a TIFF that can be viewed with on a monitor with standard programs and the extra precision can be retrieved with custom software.
I disagree that 'exotic' bit depths are not good. This format would reduce the image size by 5/6. You could even just store the 2nd image as a re-scaled version that would have the 4 bits tightly packed without padding for a 3/4 size reduction. This savings can be significant with very large data sets, where compression is not an option due to the nature of the data. Ie, many scientific and machine vision applications may want the un-adultered bits. The ability to convert from the multi-image tiff to a 16-bit tiff would allow the use of standard programs and image libraries.

Compressing High Resolution Satellite Images

Please advise the best way to compress satellite Image. Details
Uncompressed size - 60 gb
Uncompressed format - IMG
4 Bands (To be retained after compression)
Preferred compression format - JPEG2000
Lossy enough to aid in Visual analysis.
Thanks
Monika
If I'm interpreting your question correctly, you'll already need to look at the file format defined in JPEG2000 Part 2 ("JPX") because of the multiple bands. Beyond that, because you are asking for "visually lossless" (e.g. lossy compression but tuned to the point where you can't see it), you'll need to experiment with various settings using your own files until you achieve what you want. For a small discussion on how the Internet Archive did this with print materials, see A Status Report on JPEG 2000 Implementation for Still Images: The UConn Survey.
You should check out the Kakadu JPEG 2000 software. It's really fast.
The summary of one of their time tests, which sounds in line with our observed results:
'"There is an example on the spreadsheet involving a 13.3K x 13.3K RGB image (531 MBytes), being compressed to 2 bits/pixel, at 0.145 pictures/second, using the speedpack on a standard 2.4 GB core-2 duo machine. From this, it can be inferred that compressing 60 MB down to 5 MB (12:1 is 2 bits/pixel for RGB, although colour properties were not specified in the original request) should occur at a rate of 1.2 pictures/second. Compressing to the slightly lower target size of 4 MB will be a little bit faster."
http://www.kakadusoftware.com/