BIG header: one jpg or several png? - optimization

I've read some of posts here about png/jpg/gif but still I'm quite confused..
I've got a big header on my website :
width:850px height:380px weight:108kb
And it's jpg. A woman + gradient + some layers on top and behing her..
Do you think 108kb it's too much? I was thinking about cut it to png pieces..Would that be a bad idea? What's your suggestions?;) THX for help;]

It depends on the nature of the image, if it's a photograph, JPEG would give the highest quality/compression ratio, if it was pixel stuff like writing or clipart, or have some transparency, then it's GIF/PNG to choose (GIF,PNG8 offers one level transparency, while PNG24 offers a levelled transparency for each pixel).
When I'm confused, I usually save the picture in all three formats and decide what gives the best quality/size deal within the size limits I need, I also try to lower down JPEG quality to the level where the image is still good quality (because that varies from image to another).
Also, if it was a photograph with some writing, split it into a JPEG photograph with a transparent GIF writing overlay (because writing edges look distorted in JPEG).
So, when you are confused, give the three a try and decide, with time you'll gain experience what format suits what content the most.

Actually, 108kb for an image of that size isn't abnormal. It's even more optimal to have it in 1 image: your browser only needs to perform 1 get-request. If you break it up into multiple images, the user needs to wait longer for the site to load.

PNG probably wouldn't help you since JPG is usually much more efficient at handling gradients. PNG would be better if you had big unicolored spaces in your image.

Related

What is the best method to optimize a PDF with cropped, rotated pictures?

I have noticed that with cropped and rotated pictures which can happen a lot with paperless office techniques, that no tool like Adobe Acrobat or Nitro Pro can optimize away all the removed parts of the photos. Attempting to use libraries to do so in C# is an interesting challenge but could potentially save many megabytes of blank image space, or space where multiple receipts for example were scanned then cropped into separate pages and the original images are always still stored.
So to the point, there is a potentially a solution with the rotate and crop and permanently save again (while adjusting offsets to not ruin alignment of OCR or other relative data). This can be quite good in some cases but rotation represents a loss of data.
So why would it look better in a PDF reader? Subpixels e.g. ClearText. The original document rotated actually increases to monitor scale color resolution when displaying on the screen. So it is practically cheaper disk space wise to store it unrotated then on display use more processing power to adjust it and use subpixel approximations.
So 2 proposals: 1) crop it without rotating it and adjust offsets - this is wasteful a little bit (worse case at 45 degree rotation) as its a rotated rectangle within a rectangle.
2) rotate and crop it while raising to a appropriate better and color resolution and using ClearText-style enhancement to do subpixel enhancement. This seems a bit involved and it would increase the resolution while decreasing the portion of the picture which could defeat the purpose.
Does anyone have a better strategy or any suggestions to address this interesting, and yet seemingly common problem. A very nice utility tool could be written perhaps doing the naïve and 2 proposals mentioned, but perhaps I am missing a yet easier and better idea? Cutting this waste is potentially beneficial and cost saving with minimal downside if one has properly finalized their cropping decisions in PDFs.

Good library for Digital watermarking

Can somebody help me, to find a library, or a detailed description of algorithm, that could embed a Digital watermark(invisible watermark, just a kind of steganography) to a jpeg/png file. But the quality of algorithm, should be great. It should be possible to extract this mark after rotation and expansion(if possible) of image.
Mark is just a key 32bytes.
I found a good site, but the algorithm are made for the NetPBM format, that is dead...
I know that there is a LSB method, but it is not stable to the expansion. Are there something better?
Changing metadata, is not suitable, because it is visible changes.
This maybe won't really be an answer, as I don't think it would be easy to give a magical, precise answer on this question.Watermarking is complex, and the best way to do it is by yourself : this will make things more hard for an attacker trying to reverse engineer your code. One could even read your question here, guess what library you used, and attack your system more easily.
Making Steganography resist to expansion in JPEG images is also very hard, because the JPEG compression is reapplied after the expansion. There are in fact a bunch of JPEG steganography algorithms. Which one you should use, depends on what exactly do you require :
Data confidentiality ?
Message presence confidentiality ?
Message coherence after JPEG changes ?
Resistance to "Known Cover" attacks (when attackers try to find the message, based on the steganographic system) ?
Resistance to "Known Message" attacks (when attackers try to find the steganographic system used, based on the message) ?
From what I know, usually, algorithm that resist to JPEG changes (picture recompression) are often really easier to attack, whereas algorithms that run the "encode" stage during the JPEG compression (after the DCT (lossy) transform, and before the Huffmann (non-lossy) transform) are more prone to resist.
Also, one key factor about steganography is scale : if you have only 32bytes of data to encode in a, say, 256*256px image, don't use an algo that can encode 512bytes of data in the same size. Either use a scalable algorithm, either use an algorithm at its efficient scale.
Also, the best way to do good steganography is to know its limitations,and to know how steganalyzers work. Try these tools, so you can understand what attackers will do to your picture.^
Now, I cannot tell you what steganographic system will be the best for you, but I can give you some indications :
jSteg - Quite old, I don't think it will resist to JPEG changes
OutGuess - Quite old too, but one of the best algorithms
F5 (and F3/F4) - More recent, good algorithm, scientifical research behind.
stegHide
I think all of these are LSB based : the encoding is done during the JPEG compression, after the DCT and Quantization. The only non LSB-based steganography system I heard of was mentionned in this research paper, however, I did not read it to the end yet, so I cannot tell if this will meet your needs.
However, I'm not sure there exists a real steganography algorithm resisting to JPEG compression, to JPEG resize and rotation, resisting to visual and statisticals attacks. Or I'm not aware of it.
Sorry for the lack of precise answer, I tried to give you what I know on the subject, as it's always better to be more informed. Sorry also for the lack of proper English, I'm French, nobody's perfect :)
Pistache is right in what he told you regarding the watermarking implementation algorithms. I will try to help you by showing one algorithm for the given requirements.
Before explaining you the algorithms first I guess that the distinction between the JPG and PNG formats should be done.
JPEG is a lossy format, i.e, the images are susceptible to compression that could remove the watermark. When you open an image for manipulation purposes and you save it, upon the writing procedure, a compression is made by using DCT filtering that removes some important components of the image.
On the other hand, PNG format is lossless, and that means that images are not susceptible to such kind of compression when stored after manipulation.
As a matter of fact, JPEG is used as a watermarking scheme attack due to its compressing characteristic that could remove the watermark if an attacker performed the compression.
Now that you know the difference between both formats, I can tell you a suitable algorithm resistant to the attacks that you mentioned.
Regarding methods to embed a watermark message for PNG files you can use the histogram embedding method. The histogram embedding method changes values on the histogram by changing the values of the neighbor bins. For example imagine that you have a PNG image in grayscale.
Therefore, you'll have only one channel for embedding and that means that you have one histogram with 256 bins. By selecting the neighbor bins x and x+1, you change the values of x and x+1 by moving the pixels with the bright x to x+1 or the other way around, so that (x/(x+1))>T for embedding a '1' or ((x+1)/x)>T for embedding a '0'.
You can repeat the same procedure for the whole histogram length and therefore you can embed in the best case up to 128bits. However this payload is less than what you asked. Therefore I suggest you to split the image into parts, for example blocks, and if you split one image into 4 components you'd be able to embed in the best case up to
512 bits which means 64 bytes.
This method although is very, susceptible to filtering and compression if applied straight in the space domain. Therefore, I suggest you to compute before the DWT of the image and use its low-frequency sub-band. This will provide you better transparency and robustness increased for the warping, resizing etc attacks and compression or filtering as well.
There are other approaches such as LPM (Log Polar Maps) but they are very complex to implement and I think for your case this approach would be fine.
I can suggest you two papers, the first is:
Watermarking digital image and video data. A state-of-the-art overview
This paper will give you some basic notions of watermarking and explain more in detail the LSB algorithm. And the second paper is:
Real-Time Compressed- Domain Video Watermarking Resistance to Geometric Distortions
This paper will explain the algorithm that I just explained now.
Cheers,
I do not know if you are considering approaches different to steganography. Instead of storing data hidden in the pixel data you could create a new data block in the JPEG file and store encripted data.
Take a look at the JPEG file structure on Wikipedia
You can create an application specific data block, using the marker 0xFF 0xEn. Doing so, any change in the image pixels do not change the information stored in the image. Moreover, many image editing software respect custom data blocks and will keep them even after image manipulation.

Possibilities to compress an image (size)

I am implementing an application. In that I need to find out a way to compress the image (size). Because it will help a lot for me to making the space comfortable in the database(server).Please help me on this.
Thanks in advance,
Sekhar Behalam.
Your options are to reduce the dimension of the images and/or reduce the quality by increasing the compression. Are the images photographic in nature (JPG is best) or simple solid colour graphics (use PNGs)?
If the images are JPG (lossy compression) you can simply load and re-save them with a higher compression setting. This can result in a large space saving.
The image quality will of course decline, but you can get away with quite a lot of compression in JPG before it is noticeable. What is acceptable of course is determined by the use of the images (which you have not stated).
Hope this helps.
Also consider pngcrush, which is a utility that is included with the SDK. In the Project Settings in Xcode, there's an option to "Compress PNG Images." Make sure to check that. Note that this only works for resource images (as far as I know)—but you haven't stated if these images will be user-created/instantiated, or brought into the app bundle directly.

Website optimization

have can i speed up the loading of images - specialy when i open the website for the first time it takes some time for images to load...
Is there anything i can do to improve this (html, css)?
link
Thank to all for your answers.
Crop the size of http://www.ursic-ei.si/datoteke/d4.jpg! It's 900 pixels wide, and most of that (half?) is empty and white. Make the image smaller and then use background-position and backgroud-color to compensate for anything you trimmed off the edges.
You have a lot of extra newlines in your HTML source. Not hugely significant, but theoretically - since in HTML there's no practical difference between one new line and two - you might want to remove some.
For images, you should consider a content delivery network (CDN), which will cache your images and other files and server them faster than you web server.
This is a must for any high-traffic website.
On the client, you can multipart download; e.g. in Firefox there's a bunch of settings under network.http.pipelining that help speed downloads.
On the server, there's little you can do (though you can gzip text-based files). The client must just know how to cache.
Since in your question you only ask about the images, I guess you already know that the cost of php processing and/or javascript is minor. If you want to speed up the images you can reduce their size, increase the compression rate... also try different formats. JPG is not always the best one.
Try GIF and/or PNG, also with these you can reduce the number of colors. Usually this formats are way better than JPG when you have simple pictures with few colors.
Also consider if some of your images are a simple patter that can be reproduced/repeated several times. For example, if you have a background image with a side banner, you just need one line and repeat it several times.

Streaming Jpeg Resizer

Does anyone know of any code that does streaming Jpeg resizing. What I mean by this is reading a chunk of an image (depending on the original source and destination size this would obviously vary), and resizing it, allowing for lower memory consumption when resizing very large jpegs. Obviously this wouldn't work for progressive jpegs (or at least it would become much more complicated), but it should be possible for standard jpegs.
The design of JPEG data allows simple resizing to 1/2, 1/4 or 1/8 size. Other variations are possible. These same size reductions are easy to do on progressive jpegs as well and the quantity of data to parse in a progressive file will be much less if you want a reduced size image. Beyond that, your question is not specific enough to know what you really want to do.
Another simple trick to reduce the data size by 33% is to render the image into a RGB565 bitmap instead of RGB24 (if you don't need the full color space).
I don't know of a library that can do this off the shelf, but it's certainly possible.
Lets say your JPEG is using 8x8 pixel MCUs (the units in which pixels are grouped). Lets also say you are reducing by a factor to 12 to 1. The first output pixel needs to be the average of the 12x12 block of pixels at the top left of the input image. To get to the input pixels with a y coordinate greater than 8, you need to have decoded the start of the second row of MCUs. You can't really get to decode those pixels before decoding the whole of the first row of MCUs. In practice, that probably means you'll need to store two rows of decoded MCUs. Still, for a 12000x12000 pixel image (roughly 150 mega pixels) you'd reduce the memory requirements by a factor of 12000/16 = 750. That should be enough for a PC. If you're looking at embedded use, you could horizontally resize the rows of MCUs as you read them, reducing the memory requirements by another factor of 12, at the cost of a little more code complexity.
I'd find a simple jpeg decoder library like Tiny Jpeg Decoder and look at the main loop in the jpeg decode function. In the case of Tiny Jpeg Decoder, the main loop calls decode_MCU, Modify from there. :-)
You've got a bunch of fiddly work to do to make the code work for non 8x8 MCUs and a load more if you want to reduce by a none integer factor. Sounds like fun though. Good luck.