BPG Image format

News

(Apr 21 2018) Release 0.9.8 is available.

An online BPG encoder and viewer.

Introduction

High compression ratio. Files are much smaller than JPEG for similar quality.

Supported by most Web browsers with a small Javascript decoder (gzipped size: 56 KB).

Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard.

Supports the same chroma formats as JPEG (grayscale, YCbCr 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4) to reduce the losses during the conversion. An alpha channel is supported. The RGB, YCgCo and CMYK color spaces are also supported.

Native support of 8 to 14 bits per channel for a higher dynamic range.

Lossless compression is supported.

Various metadata (such as EXIF, ICC profile, XMP) can be included.

Animation support.

Download

bpgenc

bpgdec

bpgview

libbpg

libbpg-0.9.8.tar.gz

Binary distribution for Windows (64 bit only): bpg-0.9.8-win64.zip

Unofficial Github mirror.

For Mac users, the BPG utilities are available in the libbpg Homebrew formula.

Performance

Mozilla did a study of various lossy compressed image formats. HEVC (hence BPG) was a clear winner by a wide margin. BPG files are actually a little smaller than raw HEVC files because the BPG header is smaller than the corresponding HEVC header.

BPG natively supports 8 to 14 bits per channel when most other formats use 8 bits (including most of the JPEG implementations and WEBP). It gives a higher dynamic range (which is important for cameras and new displays) and a slightly better compression ratio (because there are less rounding errors in the decoder).

BPG uses high quality decimation (10 tap Lanczos filter) and interpolation (7 tap Lanczos filter) to handle the chroma samples in 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 formats.

BPG can be supported in hardware with standard HEVC decoders and encoders (it uses a subset of the Main 4:4:4 16 Still Picture Profile, Level 8.5).

Demo

Technical information

Licensing