[theora] NHW Project - paid development

[Raphael Canut]

Hello,

As I said in my previous post, I would like now to accelerate to NHW Codec
development.I started in January 2007, more than 10 years ago, and I would
like now to see it finished after all the time I gave to it (especially the
3 first years).For now I can only give 2-3 hours in the week-end to the
codec development, and furthermore I don't have all the skills to improve
it, notably in machine learning and neural networks.

The task I am blocking on is to code good lower quality settings.I am now
ok to give $1000 to who will code good lower quality settings in the NHW
codec.But there are some conditions, it must be :
-competitive with BPG (HEVC intra), except maybe for very high compression,
as the current mid quality settings are competitive with HEVC.
-royalty-free and patent-free, so it will prevent from using treillis
quantization for example, a lot of inter-band similarities & processing is
(heavily) patented by SPIHT,... I would be interested in integrating
machine learning and neural networks if it's free, and maybe GANs
(generative adversarial networks) that are very promising for
compression.They were introduced in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow -in a
publication- and I don't know if he has also patented it... I am also open
to other (free) techniques...
-relatively fast
-coded in the current source code to be able to compile it and test it with
pictures.

The problem, and I am asking your opinion on this forum, is that if there
are 10 persons that improve the NHW codec and create good lower quality
settings, I won't be able then to give 10x $1000 rewards!!!

How can I cope with this problem?

Any help is very welcome.

Many thanks!
Cheers,
Raphael
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