NBLI Image Compression

NBLI (new-bee lossless image, v0.4) is a fast, better lossless compression algorithm, which support both RGB 24-bit and Gray 8-bit image. This repo provide:

• fNBLI : The optimized NBLI, currently only provide executable file without source code.
• NBLI : The prototype of NBLI, provide both executable file and source code.

　

Compared to the popular state-of-the-art lossless image formats, fNBLI is outstanding in both speed and compression ratio.

Lossless Formats	Compressed Size (vs. PNG)	Compress Speed	Decompress Speed
BMF (-s)	-35.07%	1.3 MB/s	1.5 MB/s
Gralic	-34.32%	4.2 MB/s	3.5 MB/s
NBLI (-g)	-30.37%	14.7 MB/s	17.0 MB/s
JPEG-XL (-e 8)	-30.25%	0.6 MB/s	14.5 MB/s
fNBLI	-29.79%	94.8 MB/s	149.1 MB/s
JPEG-XL (-e 6)	-28.63%	2.4 MB/s	19.1 MB/s
JPEG-XL (-e 3)	-26.53%	19.2 MB/s	27.9 MB/s
WEBP (-5)	-22.53%	3.7 MB/s	82.8 MB/s
JPEG-XL (-e 1)	-13.49%	95.2 MB/s	71.0 MB/s
PNG (optipng)	0.00%	0.9 MB/s	153.7 MB/s
JPEG2000	+4.60%	12.8 MB/s	14.9 MB/s
PNG	+5.13%	12.2 MB/s	121.5 MB/s
Uncompressed	+114.77%

The dataset of above comparison is the training image set of CLIC2021 competition, which includes 585 RGB 24-bit images, totaling 4GB (the downloaded zip file is about 2GB). All above compressor/decompressor are tested in single-threaded, See Lossless-Image-Compression-Benchmark for detail.

　

Compile NBLI.exe

Compile in Windows CMD

If you installed MinGW Compiler for Windows, you can run following command to compile NBLI, getting the executable file NBLI.exe

g++ src\NBLI\main.cpp src\imageio\*.c src\imageio\uPNG\*.c src\NBLI\NBLI.cpp -static -O3 -Wall -o NBLI.exe

Compile in Linux

Run following command to compile NBLI, getting the binary file NBLI

g++ src/NBLI/main.cpp  src/imageio/*.c src/imageio/uPNG/*.c src/NBLI/NBLI.cpp -static -O3 -Wall -o NBLI

　

Use NBLI.exe

Run NBLI.exe without any parameters to display its usage:

> .\NBLI.exe
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| NBLI : new-bee lossless image codec (single-threaded, v0.4, 202409)              |
|   by https://github.com/WangXuan95/                                              |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Usage:                                                                           |
|   NBLI [-switches]  <in1> [-o <out1>]  [<in2> [-o <out2]]  ...                   |
|                                                                                  |
| To compress:                                                                     |
|   <in>  can be .pgm, .ppm, .pnm, or .png                                         |
|   <out> can be .nbli. It will be generated if not specified.                     |
|                                                                                  |
| To decompress:                                                                   |
|   <in>  can be .nbli                                                             |
|   <out> can be .pgm, .ppm, .pnm, or .png. It will be generated if not specified. |
|                                                                                  |
| switches: -v   : verbose                                                         |
|           -f   : force overwrite of output file                                  |
|           -x   : putting CRC32 when compressing                                  |
|           -0~7 : distortion level. 0=lossless (default), 1~7=lossy               |
|           -g   : use golomb arithmetic coding tree instead of ANS coding (slower)|
|           -a   : use advanced predictor (extremely slow)                         |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Take the images I provided in the ./image/ folder as examples :

Compress a .png file to a .nbli file :

NBLI.exe -vf image\RGB.png -o RGB.nbli

Compress a .png file to a .nbli file, use Golomb coding tree (-g) and Advanced predictor (-a) to obtain higher compression ratio :

NBLI.exe -vfga image\RGB.png -o RGB.nbli

Compress a .png file to a .nbli file, set distortion level to 1 (lossy!!) :

NBLI.exe -vf1 image\RGB.png -o RGB.nbli

Decompress the .nbli file back to a .png file :

NBLI.exe -vf RGB.nbli -o RGB.png

　

Use fNBLI.exe

Run fNBLI.exe without any parameters to display its usage:

> .\fNBLI.exe
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| fNBLI : fast new-bee lossless image codec (single-threaded, v0.4, 202409)        |
|   by https://github.com/WangXuan95/                                              |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| this CPU: AVX2 supported                                                         |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Usage:                                                                           |
|   fNBLI [-switches]  <in1> [-o <out1>]  [<in2> [-o <out2]]  ...                  |
|                                                                                  |
| To compress:                                                                     |
|   <in>  can be .pgm, .ppm, .pnm, or .png                                         |
|   <out> can be .fnbli. It will be generated if not specified.                    |
|                                                                                  |
| To decompress:                                                                   |
|   <in>  can be .fnbli                                                            |
|   <out> can be .pgm, .ppm, .pnm, or .png. It will be generated if not specified. |
|                                                                                  |
| switches: -v : verbose                                                           |
|           -f : force overwrite of output file                                    |
|           -x : putting CRC32 when compressing                                    |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Take the images I provided in the ./image/ folder as examples :

Compress a .pgm file (Gray image) to a .fnbli file :

fNBLI.exe -vf image\Gray.pgm -o Gray.fnbli

Compress a .ppm file (RGB image) to a .fnbli file :

fNBLI.exe -vf image\RGB.ppm -o RGB.fnbli

Compress a .png file to .fnbli file :

fNBLI.exe -vf image\RGB.png -o RGB.fnbli

Decompress the .fnbli file back to a .ppm file :

fNBLI.exe -vf RGB.fnbli -o RGB.ppm

Decompress the .fnbli file back to a .png file :

fNBLI.exe -vf RGB.fnbli -o RGB.png

　

Acknowledgments

Thank the bottle of beer I drank on the evening after my PhD dissertation, which inspired me to come up with a novel parallel entropy encoding method that does not affect the compression ratio, which is the basis of fNBLI.

As for NBLI, Its main method is not novel. The following works and peoples need to be mentioned:

• ANS-entropy-coding by Jarosław Duda, Yann Collet, et al.
• CALIC: Context-based, adaptive, lossless image coding: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/585919 by X. Wu et al.
• EDP: Edge-directed prediction for lossless compression of natural images: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/923277 by Xin Li et al.
• Glicbawls: Gray Level Image Compression by Adaptive Weighted Least Squares: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221578041_Glicbawls_-_Grey_Level_Image_Compression_by_Adaptive_Weighted_Least_Squares by Bernd Meyer et al.
• MRP: Lossless coding using variable block-size adaptive prediction optimized for each image: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7078076 by Ichiro Matsuda et al.
• A lossless color image compression method based on a new reversible color transform: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6410808 by Seyun Kim et al.
• JPEG-LS extension (ITU-T T.870)
• The experts of data compression, Alex Rhatushnyak, Matt Mahoney, Igor Pavlov, et al.
• And of course, Claude E. Shannon.