An update on the JPEG XL standardization effort: JPEG XL is a practical approach focused on scalable web distribution and efficient compression of high-quality images. It will provide various benefits compared to existing image formats: significantly smaller size at equivalent subjective quality; fast, parallelizable decoding and encoding configurations; features such as progressive, lossless, animation, and reversible transcoding of existing JPEG; support for high-quality applications including wide gamut, higher resolution/bit depth/dynamic range, and visually lossless coding. Additionally, a royalty-free baseline is an important goal. The JPEG XL architecture is traditional block-transform coding with upgrades to each component. We describe these components and analyze decoded image quality.

Brotli is an open source general-purpose data compressor introduced by Google in late 2013 and now adopted in most known browsers and Web servers. It is publicly available on GitHub and its data format was submitted as RFC 7932 in July 2016. Brotli is based on the Lempel-Ziv compression scheme and planned as a generic replacement of Gzip and ZLib. The main goal in its design was to compress data on the Internet, which meant optimizing the resources used at decoding time, while achieving maximal compression density. This article is intended to provide the first thorough, systematic description of the Brotli format as well as a detailed computational and experimental analysis of the main algorithmic blocks underlying the current encoder implementation, together with a comparison against compressors of different families constituting the state-of-the-art either in practice or in theory. This treatment will allow us to raise a set of new algorithmic and software engineering problems that deserve further attention from the scientific community.

We report on pairwise comparisons by human raters of JPEG images from libjpeg and our new Guetzli encoder. Although both files are size-matched, 75% of ratings are in favor of Guetzli. This implies the Butteraugli psychovisual image similarity metric which guides Guetzli is reasonably close to human perception at high quality levels. We provide access to the raw ratings and source images for further analysis and study.