Fractal Explorer

Fractal Compression

Introduction

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As you can probably imagine, a fractal method to compress images should be pretty powerfull. Then why does such a thing not exist? The common compression method for images at the moment ist JPEG. But there is a fractal image compression format called .fif (Fractal Image Format).

 

How does the Fractal Image Format work?

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One of the aspects of fractals is self similarity. This is what the Fractal Image Format trys to use. It searches for doubled elements in images. But not only 100% copies but also rotated, scaled or approximate copies, depending on the compression rate. It is now possible to find such self similarity in nearly every image. What the Fractal Image Format now does is to find these doubled elements and determine rules, how the one element can be calculated out of the other.

Advantages of the Fractal Image Format:

• The quality is extremly high, higher than JPEG
• It is better scaleable

Disadvantages of the Fractal Image Format:

• The support is not as good as with JPEG. You need extra plugins to watch them in your browser.
• It needs more calculation power to be encoded / decoded