A company called Human Monitoring Ltd have recently announced a new image compression technology based on the existing h.264 standard (which that has been around a while and you may have come across it with video files).
The advantage of using an existing standard as opposed to creating a new one is that it can reuse existing encoding hardware that is already in place in millions of cameras and chipsets worldwide. Pretty smart.
Human Monitoring’s hipix™ patent pending technology utilises the existing h.264 video Codec to achieve two to seven times more effective still image compression compared to JPEG images. Sounds almost too good to be true, but if you check out the demos on their website, you will be suitably impressed.
To view hipix images on a computer or mobile device, users must initially download a viewer and to create or convert images users need the hipix “Wiz” application. The applications are available for Windows, Linux and Android operating systems.
Just think of the how much bandwidth could be saved when emailing or sending photos over the internet – all while keeping a very high quality image.
Check out the video demo:
More info can be found on the hipix website here.