[theora] NHW Project - high compression & community

[Raphael Canut]

Hello,

I've found some time to get back to the NHW Project.In fact a Xiph forum
member told me that even if I will start a new job, he hopes that I will
still continue to develop a little the NHW Project, on my spare time.I told
him that I would furthermore spend my spare time on the NHW Project if a
community around the project could emerge... and he told me that certainly
the best way for that is to keep posting updates and improvement of the
project and attracting attention.

So I have followed his advice, and I have coded an experimental -l8 quality
setting.But actually I have just "mechanically" increased the compression
parameters, like quantization, wavelet thresholds and the results start to
be really not as good as x265 (HEVC).HEVC starts to be very good in fact at
very high compression, it really preserves the contours, edges, and applies
a rather strong denoising, details washing-out inside the contours.The
resulting image can appear then a little "cartoonish" but visually it's the
result I neatly prefer compared to x264, WebP, Rududu results and artifacts
at these same very high compression ratios.(This is also confirmed by PSNR
and SSIM...)

So for -l8 very high compression setting and above, I will need to find a
new approach of compression and perceptual quality, and new
processings.Again if you have skills in image and signal processing,
compression, machine learning, and other, and you think you can help us, do
not hesitate to show up.The NHW Project is an advanced and promising
project, first because it is royalty-free, it uses wavelets but does not
use the heavily patented SPIHT and EZW tree coding.It is also very fast,
for example it is as good or better than Google WebP but a lot faster,
currently 3x faster to encode (from .ppm) and 4x faster to decode (to
.ppm), and WebP is highly optimized: multithreading, SIMD, so with these
same optimizations the NHW Project is at least 12-15x faster to encode and
16-20x faster to decode than WebP!!!

More generally, if you want to help and join the NHW Project community, if
you want to support and push the NHW Project so that it raises attention of
the major companies and players of the image/video compression area, do not
hesitate to show up, would be much appreciated!!!

I am also aware that Xiph forum members and so NHW Project community
members asked me to create demo pages of the NHW codec notably, and they
are right it is really needed.Are there members that have graphical design
skills?

Many thanks!!!
Cheers,
Raphael
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