image compression

A short explainer from Nat and Friends on where Google Earth's 3D imagery comes from, how it is stitched together, and how often it is updated. It describes aircraft carrying camera rigs and photogrammetry that turns the photos into 3D models.

A King of the Hill clip in which Hank-style character rants about saving images as PNG instead of JPEG after exporting from Windows Paint.

A six-minute clip of Adobe's MAX 2011 sneak peek showing a Photoshop prototype that removes motion blur from photos. The audience reacts with astonishment as blurry images become legible.

Mike Pound explains the discrete cosine transform and how it underpins JPEG compression. It is part two of Computerphile's JPEG series.

A short side-by-side demo of a large image loading over a slow connection in JPEG, progressive mozjpeg, JPEG XL and AVIF. It shows how each codec renders partial data.

A guest video by Welch Labs on 3Blue1Brown explaining how text-to-image and video models work. It covers CLIP, shared embedding spaces, diffusion models (DDPM, DDIM), conditioning, guidance and negative prompts.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

The Thought Emporium shows how to receive clear images directly from GOES-15, 16 and 17 and Himawari 8 geostationary weather satellites with software-defined radio. It covers the extra effort needed to receive GOES data.

David Kriesel's FrOSCon talk on how Xerox scancopiers, due to JBIG2 compression, silently replaced digits in scanned documents. He walks through how he discovered the bug and why it is so dangerous.

A short video accompanying the CVPR 2018 paper Learning to See in the Dark. It shows a neural network producing sharp images from very low-light raw sensor data, compared against denoising approaches.

A one-minute scene from the film Enemy of the State showing absurdly implausible image enhancement, with freezing, rotating, zooming and focusing on a video.

Ilya Sutskever gives a Simons Institute talk on why neural networks generalize, framing learning as finding short descriptions, like compression. It was part of the Large Language Models and Transformers program.

A short Harris Corporation (L3Harris) promotional video showing wide-area airborne motion imagery, a sensor system for persistent real-time aerial surveillance of large areas.

A SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 research demo of 3-Sweep, a tool for extracting editable 3D objects from a single photo using a few user strokes. It predates modern AI image tools.

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.

A condensed rendition of a project that re-uploaded one video to YouTube 1000 times, showing the accumulating compression artifacts. It pays homage to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room.

A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.

Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.

Peter Norvig, then Director of Research at Google, talks at Startup School 2008 about leveraging large amounts of data and about technical challenges in Google projects such as image search. A central idea is that data can beat hand-written programming.

Veritasium visits the US Navy's Crane facility to test top night vision goggles. It explains how image intensifier tubes and thermal or digital systems work and compares the generations of the technology.

Jessie Frazelle's DockerCon SF 2015 talk on running Docker containers for desktop applications, with fun container hacks and images. It shows how far containers can be pushed beyond servers.

Lex Fridman interviews Marcus Hutter of DeepMind about universal artificial intelligence, AIXI, Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction and the idea of intelligence as compression.

A one-minute clip from a CSI episode featuring the trope of zooming and enhancing low-resolution images. The uploader says it was the last CSI episode they watched.

A two-minute supercut of film and TV characters ordering a computer to 'enhance' a blurry image into a perfectly sharp one. It is a remaster of an earlier 2009 version.

A spectrogram analysis of Aphex Twin's track commonly called [Equation] from Windowlicker, rendered from a lossless version. At about 5:30 the spectrogram reveals an image of Richard D. James's face.

A two-minute compilation of TV and film scenes where investigators say 'enhance' and a blurry image becomes sharp. It mocks the trope.

A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

MinutePhysics explains that computers store brightness nonlinearly, so blurring and blending colors in raw RGB gives wrong, dark results. It shows why mixed colors, such as in gradients, look off.

A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.

Andrew Adams, a Halide developer, presents the Halide language for image processing and tensor computation. The talk explains the separation of algorithm from schedule with illustrated examples of parallelism, locality and redundancy tradeoffs.

An episode of the comedic You Suck at Photoshop series in which Donnie Hoyle teaches distort, warp and layer effects while vandalizing a Vanagon in the image. It won Webby awards as a how-to and comedy series.

Lesson 1 of fast.ai's Practical Deep Learning for Coders, taught by Jeremy Howard. It takes coders from running code in a Jupyter notebook straight into training a real image model.

A short demo of an open-source Krita plugin that uses Stable Diffusion to generate and edit images in place. It adds ControlNet scribble and line-art support. You select an area, push a button, and new matching content appears.

An artist describes discovering she has aphantasia, the inability to form mental images, and how it affects her work. She asks viewers about their own visualization.

Political economist Mark Blyth gives a lecture tracing two versions of capitalist 'software': the postwar Great Compression era and the neoliberal era from 1980 to 2008. He explains the bug that crashed the first and the design of the second.

Onslaught's Bad Apple 64 is a Commodore 64 demo that streams over 2000 frames of the Bad Apple animation from a single disk side at 12fps, with each frame packed to around 70 bytes.

A 2023 University of Toronto conversation between Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li on responsible AI development. They look back at the history of deep learning and ImageNet and discuss the ethics and risks of AI.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS231n course on convolutional neural networks for visual recognition. It surveys the history and key challenges of computer vision, from the Cambrian explosion and Hubel and Wiesel to ImageNet.