“Generation Loss” by David Elliott shows what a JPEG image can look like after saving it 600 times, each time slightly increasing the compression.

via Boing Boing


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matsonian March 22, 2009 at 5:01 pm

Cool… if you keep staring at the final image, I swear I see Madonna on a horse wearing lederhosen.

Mike Kupietz March 22, 2009 at 6:03 pm

Interesting, I’ve been curious about this. I’ve been wanting to do something similar with MP3 compression at various quality settings.

Mike Kupietz March 22, 2009 at 6:04 pm

Come to think of it, I’d like to see this go far beyond 600 saves… I wonder if it hits homeostasis, or the noisy result keeps changing indefinitely.

Robert Solomon March 22, 2009 at 6:25 pm

JPEG is lossy compression; each time info is lost. Thus, it reaches a point where there is not enough info for an image. Would not happen with lossless compression. JPEG is a wavelet based technique based on sine waves.

Patrick Taylor March 22, 2009 at 9:07 pm

@Robert Solomon.

I believe you’re thinking of JPEG2000, which is wavelet based, but JPEG itself isn’t.

Mike Kupietz March 23, 2009 at 2:12 am

@Robert, I understand what you’re saying but the precise compression depends on the image content. There could be an image which either can be maximally compressed without loss – for instance, by your reasoning, a solid black image, because an image cannot contain any less content than that. Or perhaps you get a cycle of images which repeats. I think an experiment is called for.

Vlasta March 23, 2009 at 6:31 am

There are ways around it… try this with RealWorld Photos editor and it will stay the same after 600 saves.

Jesse March 23, 2009 at 9:33 am

Neat, it starts looking like a Monet at one point.

Guy Parkinson March 23, 2009 at 7:19 pm

Reciprocal entropy

Anand March 24, 2009 at 10:34 am

Should have chosen a better image, a face probably..Barack Obama?

Tim August 10, 2009 at 8:27 am

Why increase the compression every time? (and how was that increase done 600 times??) Test should be done at a decent compression setting, like 80%, and that setting kept for the 600 times -more realistic. (like saving 600 times is realistic, lol).

Tim August 10, 2009 at 8:28 am

PS: Very cool video. I should have said that first. :-)

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