SIC (Structured Image Compression) . New lossy codec

[CruNcher]

that sounds the way to go bring yourself into another dct based compression sheme and its encoder improvement

either go the route of improving AV1 or maybe try how much you can improve out of x264 or maybe even H.263 era like XVID

after you have some reliable improvements if your idea is to survive from your work Patent it immediately.

i mean you should be abble to bring improvements into exisiting code bases

[Nania Francesco]

I've continued to build the compression engine, including quantization and other filtering. Here's a test of the development version (without interframe prediction).
This bar chart compares the average SSIMULACRA2 scores—a perceptual image quality metric—across four codecs, all tested at the same bitrate:

JPEG XL (50% quality) achieves the highest average score (56.6, demonstrating the best overall visual fidelity among the tested formats.

SIC codec (23% quality) follows closely at 53.02, outperforming AVIF (43% quality), which scores 51.75. This is notable because SIC maintains competitive quality at a significantly lower quality setting.

JPEG, the traditional format, lags far behind with an average score of 26.97, showing substantial perceptual quality loss compared to modern codecs.

Key Insight:
Modern codecs like JPEG XL, AVIF, and the SIC codec deliver roughly double the perceptual quality of legacy JPEG at the same bitrate, with JPEG XL taking the lead
https://encode.su/attachment.php?att...7&d=1757803503
https://encode.su/attachment.php?att...8&d=1757803519

[Z2697]

Please, include more "perceptual" steps and results in the research process.
x265/aomenc/SVT-AV1 used on still images are really strong, with AV1 tend to "prefer" low bitrates just like it with videos.
AVIF is the one has highest compression ratio amongst the tested codecs, although not by far when compared to JPEG-XL (unless a very very bad AV1 encoder is used as its "core"), the metric fails to show that, then it's not a good metric for this purpose.

[Nania Francesco]

I wanted to make an announcement. The next version of SIC will include a new transform for which I hold the intellectual property and which has obviously never been used in image compression. I need to restructure a large part of the code. I don't know if I'll continue using the DCT, which doesn't give me the same results, especially at high quantizations (which doesn't mean it's inefficient). The results are such that there is nothing left to do but change course.
I will not use DCHT but a different proprietary transform of mine that is superior to it which allows me to compete very often with AVIF and JPEGXL without filters, inter frame prediction, or special denoise.

[Nania Francesco]

I've released the new version of SIC 0.200, which breaks away from the DCT dependency and switches to my proprietary OGBT transform , the research for which I published on zenodo. Happy testing!

DOWNLOAD page:

http://heartofcomp.altervista.org/SICodec.htm

[Nania Francesco]

I've released version 0.201, which provides access to multithreading (https://zenodo.org/records/18429911) doubling (or even more for large files) the compression and decompression speed.


DOWNLOAD page:

http://heartofcomp.altervista.org/SICodec.htm