Better Portable Graphics

Better Portable Graphics
Filename extension
.bpg
Internet media typeimage/bpg, image/x-bpg
Magic number42 50 47 fb
Initial release2014 (2014)
Latest release
0.9.8
21 April 2018; 6 years ago (2018-04-21)
Type of formatlossy/lossless bitmap image format
Extended fromHEVC
Open format?Yes
Websitebellard.org/bpg

Better Portable Graphics (BPG) is a file format for coding digital images, which was created by programmer Fabrice Bellard in 2014. He has proposed it as a replacement for the JPEG image format as the more compression-efficient alternative in terms of image quality or file size.[1] It is based on the intra-frame encoding of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video compression standard.[2] Tests on photographic images in July 2014 found that BPG produced smaller files for a given quality than JPEG, JPEG XR and WebP.[3]

The format has been designed to be portable and work in low memory environments, and used in portable handheld and IoT devices, where those properties are particularly important. Current research works on designing and developing more energy-efficient BPG hardware which can then be integrated in portable devices such as digital cameras.[4][5]

While there is no built-in native support for BPG in any mainstream browsers, websites can still deliver BPG images to all browsers by including a JavaScript library written by Bellard.[1] Others followed Bellard's idea and created the AVIF image format based on the AV1 video codec, which is patent free and therefore got implemented in browsers.

  1. ^ a b "BPG Image format". Fabrice Bellard. 2014. Retrieved 2016-04-02.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Spec was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference mozilla_2014-10 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ U. Albalawi, S. P. Mohanty and E. Kougianos, "Energy-Efficient Design of the Secure Better Portable Graphics Compression Architecture for Trusted Image Communication in the IoT", in Proceedings of the 15th IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI), 2016, pp. 302--307.
  5. ^ U. Albalawi, S. P. Mohanty, and E. Kougianos, “A Hardware Architecture for Better Portable Graphics (BPG) Compression Encoder”, in Proceedings of the 1st IEEE International Symposium on Nanoelectronic and Information Systems, 2015, pp. 291-296.