Objective assessment of the WebP image coding algorithm

Research on multimedia data coding is allowing for better performance in terms of compression ratio, coding features, and robustness against transmission errors. While rate-distortion performance is being improved at a slower pace if compared to what we were used to up to a decade ago, remarkable advances are being made by adding complex features, such as fast adaptive transforms, lossy to lossless coding, compressed domain processing, etc. One of the latest codec which is expected to improve on the state of the art is the WebP algorithm released by Google. In this paper we provide an objective evaluation of WebP, by comparing it with the JPEG family algorithms. From the results it appears that the performance of the proposed codec is in line with that of the alternative methods, without achieving any major improvement and lacking several features. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.