[theora] NHW Project development

[Raphael Canut]

Hello,

I know there is no community around NHW, but I would have liked to know
what you would like to see improved in the NHW codec.I know its results are
not perfect for now compared to high-end AV1/VVC codecs for example, but
could be ok giving its extremely fast speed.-However on high quality
images, I notably like its good results because of its neatness.-

Regarding things to improve, there is the problem of aliasing, I have
started some quick experiments as I mainly find that aliasing appears in
NHW along "low-contrast edges", but I have also seen some very impressive
results of directional filters like the ones used in CDEF filter in AV1,
because they estimate the "strong edge direction" and align all the pixels
on that "strong edge direction" which could depixelize/remove aliasing.I
have also started to implement a banding detector (with its main analysis
on the 128x128 wavelet DC image) in order to remove banding, and it's only
the beginning but I have promising results.I have also started to improve
the entropy coding scheme of the wavelet DC part, for now I have a very
fast processing that gives another 1KB saving on that part in average, but
I have an error on some few images, I don't think I contradict the
compression and information theory principles, I think it is more a corner
case that I did not see for now and so that I don't handle, but it takes a
lot of time... I'll also have to better handle the chroma channels and
notably add chroma from luma technique.

Some people also tell me that the priority now is to adapt NHW to any image
size, but actually this is the boring task for me currently, and I am a
little reluctant for now.

All that to let you know that I really like more to work on my codec, and
so I would like now to work full-time on it again, but there is always the
big problem of the salary at the end of the month.As the industry doesn't
show interest in NHW, I would like to ask sponsoring for this project on
the Internet.But some people told me that I failed to create a community
around NHW, and with just 27 followers on GitHub and 8 followers on Twitter
(that's very weak), I can not hope more than 10dollars/per month of
sponsoring/donation.

Do you think this solution/sponsoring is possible? Or on the contrary, NHW
will be just a spare time hobby, because there is nothing more to expect
out of it?

Any help/opinion is very welcome!

Cheers,
Raphael
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