Google's Jpegli Offers ~35% Compression Improvement For High Quality JPEGs

The Google Open-Source Blog today announced Jpegli, a JPEG coding library for encode/decode that maintains backwards compatibility with JPEG while offering around a 35% compression ratio improvement for high quality JPEG compression.

Jpegli aims to be a far more efficient and faster JPEG coding library than traditional JPEG handling. Jpegli's encode and decode complies with the original JPEG standard, compressed images should be clearer and with fewer artifacts, performance is very fast with the likes of libjpeg-turbo and MozJPEG, and there is support for encoding with 10+ bits per component.

The Google blog post explains of Jpegli:

"Jpegli works by using a number of new techniques to reduce noise and improve image quality; mainly adaptive quantization heuristics from the JPEG XL reference implementation, improved quantization matrix selection, calculating intermediate results precisely, and having the possibility to use a more advanced colorspace. All the new methods have been carefully crafted to use the traditional 8-bit JPEG formalism, so newly compressed images are compatible with existing JPEG viewers such as browsers, image processing software, and others."

Google stats Jpegli can compress high quality images 35% more than traditional JPEG codecs. The Jpegli code for now at least is living within the libjxl (JPEG-XL library) repository.