History
Michael Barnsley led development of fractal compression in 1987, and was granted several patents on the technology. The most widely known practical fractal compression algorithm was invented by Barnsley and Alan Sloan. Barnsley's graduate student Arnaud Jacquin implemented the first automatic algorithm in software in 1992. All methods are based on the fractal transform using iterated function systems. Michael Barnsley and Alan Sloan formed Iterated Systems Inc. in 1987 which was granted over 20 additional patents related to fractal compression.
A major breakthrough for Iterated Systems Inc. was the automatic fractal transform process which eliminated the need for human intervention during compression as was the case in early experimentation with fractal compression technology. In 1992 Iterated Systems Inc. received a $2.1 million government grant to develop a prototype digital image storage and decompression chip using fractal transform image compression technology.
Fractal image compression has been used in a number of commercial applications: onOne Software, developed under license from Iterated Systems Inc., Genuine Fractals 5 which is a Photoshop plugin capable of saving files in compressed FIF (Fractal Image Format). To date the most successful use of still fractal image compression is by Microsoft in its Encarta multimedia encyclopedia, also under license.
Iterated Systems Inc. supplied a shareware encoder (Fractal Imager), a stand alone decoder, a Netscape plug-in decoder and a development package for use under Windows. As wavelet-based methods of image compression improved and were more easily licensed by commercial software vendors the adoption of the Fractal Image Format failed to evolve. The redistribution of the "decompressor DLL" provided by the ColorBox III SDK was governed by restrictive per-disk or year-by-year licensing regimes for proprietary software vendors and by a discretionary scheme that entailed the promotion of the Iterated Systems products for certain classes of other users.
During the 1990s Iterated Systems Inc. and its partners expended considerable resources to bring fractal compression to video. While compression results were promising, computer hardware of that time lacked the processing power for fractal video compression to be practical beyond a few select usages. Up to 15 hours were required to compress a single minute of video.
ClearVideo — also known as RealVideo (Fractal) — and SoftVideo were early fractal video compression products. ClearFusion was Iterated's freely distributed streaming video plugin for web browsers. In 1994 SoftVideo was licensed to Spectrum Holobyte for use in its CD-ROM games including Falcon Gold and Star Trek: The Next Generation A Final Unity.
In 1996 Iterated Systems Inc. announced an alliance with the Mitsubishi Corporation to market ClearVideo to their Japanese customers. The original ClearVideo 1.2 decoder driver is still supported by Microsoft in Windows Media Player although the encoder is no longer supported.
Numerous research papers have been published during the past few years discussing possible solutions to improve fractal algorithms and encoding hardware.
Read more about this topic: Fractal Compression
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