2026-05-07 –, Room 3 Language: English
Standardized in 2022, thirty years after the original 1992 JPEG format, the JPEG XL format brings many improvements and new features that are missing in the 'old JPEG': better compression, a lossless mode, support for alpha transparency (and many other kinds of 'extra channels'), HDR, layered images, and animation, for example. Browser support for JPEG XL has recently gained momentum: both Chromium and Firefox are adding JPEG XL support, while Safari already supports it since 2023.
In this talk we'll dive deep into the actual codec design. How can JPEG XL reversibly recompress existing JPEG files while reducing their size by 20%? How does it achieve better lossless compression than PNG? How does it take advantage of modern processors (SIMD, multi-threading)? What was the design philosophy and which trade-offs were made in the design of this codec?
Those are some of the questions that will be answered.
Dr. Jon Sneyers is a Staff Researcher at Cloudinary, a company providing cloud-based image and video management services to a million web developers at thousands of companies. His research focuses on image processing and image compression. He is the co-creator of the FLIF and JPEG XL image formats, an active participant in the JPEG committee and an editor of the ISO/IEC 18181 standard (JPEG XL) and the ISO/IEC 29170-3 standard (Subjective quality assessment of high-fidelity images, JPEG AIC-3).