Jul 24, 2023 07:00:00

What is the origin of Apple's newly supported 'JPEG XL' standard?

At the developer conference ``

WWDC2023 '' held in June 2023, Apple announced support for the image format `` JPEG XL ''. John Snairs of Cloudinary, an image management service provider who was involved in the development, talks about the origin with joy about Apple's decision to support the format for only 3 years as a standard.

Rise of JPEG XL: Apple's Support and Image Compression Insights
https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-how-it-started-how-its-going

The JPEG XL standard started in 2018. Initially, the JPEG committee solicited proposals for the next generation of image compression.

Technology public offering of new standard 'JPEG XL' that improves compression rate by 60% with current image quality as it is - GIGAZINE

Among the seven proposed proposals, 'PIK' by Google and 'FUIF' by Cloudinary stood out, so a new codec was designed by integrating the two proposals.

Technical work to be completed by the end of 2020. In November 2020 Cloudinary decided to support JPEG XL (JXL).

In early April 2021, ahead of JPEG XL standardization, Chrome and Firefox also decided to support experimentally one after another. JPEG XL was standardized in March 2022 and has been adopted by image editing software such as Serif Affinity, Adobe Camera Raw, GIMP, and Krita. In addition, Chrome has decided to stop supporting JPEG XL in October 2022.

For this reason, Apple's announcement of support for JPEG XL in June 2023 was taken with surprise by those involved in JPEG XL development.

Below is a comparative graph with the visual quality index (

SSIMULACRA v2.1 ) on the horizontal axis. Left is compression performance, right is encoding speed, red line is JPEG XL, yellow is AVIF/libaom , green is WebP , white is mozjpeg . This result generally suggests that JPEG XL]AVIF]WebP and mozjpeg are superior in that order.

Especially in terms of compression performance, JPEG XL is superior on average, but there are variations depending on the image, and there are cases where AVIF is superior. Snyers said he is working on a new version of Cloudinary that uses AI to automatically select the best format to use for each image.