Iterated Systems’ Fractal Compression

GIF, JPG and FIF

The image above is 58,655 bytes, it is 320×240 pixels with 256 colours and is in GIF format.

Using 90% “compression quality” LView Pro converted the image to a JPG of 31,012 bytes
(below left).

Iterated Systems’ Fractal Imager 1.1 was used to compress it with “image quality” set to 90%.
The resulting image was 22,238 bytes (below right). If you can’t see the image below right you
may need the Fractal Viewer plug-in from the Altamira Group’s web site. Actually, this viewer
plug-in may no longer be available (the installer was called fvp16w32.exe).

Also, the viewer plug-in will likely only work in Internet Explorer 4 or earlier. When installing
the viewer plug-in use the destination directory “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer”. It may
be possible to get the viewer plug-in to work in Firefox 3 by manually copying npfif.dll from
“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\PlugIns” to “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\PlugIns”.

Alternatively, if it is still not possible to view the FIF image in Internet Explorer, then download
FIFView.exe, Deco_16.dll and Deco_16b.dll into the same folder and use FIFView.exe to
view the FIF file. The image was encoded using Fractal Imager 1.1.

Zooming an FIF

The screen shot below compares the zooming quality of the original GIF image (below left)
and the compressed FIF image (below right). Both have been magnified 8×.

This comparsion is somewhat subjective because the screen shot itself is a JPG image and
may be displayed using dithered colours on your screen.

However, the zoomed FIF image (on the right) demonstrates the ability of Fractal compression
to detect textures in an image and use them to provide a higher quality zoom.

Fractal Image Compression works best on 24-bit (16 million) colour images that have not been
processed in any way and contain a lot of natural textures.

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