Google Introduces Jpegli, a JPEG Coding Library for Faster and Clearer Web Images

Google has introduced Jpegli, an innovative JPEG coding library that promises to transform the way images are encoded and decoded on the internet.

Designed to improve page load times and enhance user experience, Jpegli delivers faster, more efficient, and visually superior results compared to traditional JPEG codecs.

What is Jpegli?

Jpegli is a cutting-edge JPEG coding library that combines advanced techniques to maintain high backward compatibility while offering enhanced capabilities. It provides a fully interoperable encoder and decoder that complies with the original JPEG standard and its conventional 8-bit formalism, ensuring seamless integration with existing workflows and viewers.

One of the standout features of Jpegli is its ability to produce high-quality results. By employing more precise and psychovisually effective computations, images compressed or decompressed through Jpegli appear clearer and exhibit fewer observable artefacts.

This improvement in visual quality is achieved without sacrificing coding speed performance or memory use, making it an attractive option for web developers seeking to optimize their image handling processes.

Jpegli's versatility extends beyond its impressive image quality. The library supports encoding with 10+ bits per component, surpassing the limitations of traditional JPEG coding solutions that offer only 8-bit per component dynamics.

This increased bit depth helps eliminate visible banding artefacts in gradients, resulting in smoother and more visually appealing images. Notably, Jpegli's 10+ bit coding is fully interoperable with 8-bit viewers, ensuring broad compatibility.

How Jpegli works

In addition to its visual enhancements, Jpegli excels in compression efficiency. By utilizing adaptive quantization heuristics originally developed for JPEG XL, improved quantization matrix selection, and precise intermediate results, Jpegli achieves a remarkable 35% compression ratio improvement at high-quality compression settings compared to traditional JPEG codecs.

This increased density translates to reduced bandwidth and storage requirements, ultimately leading to faster-loading web pages.

Effectiveness of Jpegli

To quantify Jpegli's image quality improvements, Google conducted a study using crowdsourcing raters to compare image pairs encoded with Jpegli, libjpeg-turbo, and MozJPEG at various bitrates. The results aggregated using an ELO scoring system, demonstrated that Jpegli at 2.8 bits per pixel (BPP) received a higher ELO rating than libjpeg-turbo at 3.7 BPP, showcasing Jpegli's superior performance at a 32% lower bitrate.

With its impressive combination of faster coding speed, improved image quality, and enhanced compression efficiency, Jpegli is poised to make a significant impact on the internet landscape.

As web developers and content creators embrace this revolutionary technology, users can look forward to faster-loading pages and a more visually engaging online experience.

Google's introduction of Jpegli marks a major step forward in the ongoing quest to optimize image encoding and delivery, promising a future where the internet is not only faster but also more beautiful.