Hello,

Here is the demo page of the NHW Project.

The aim of the project is to create an advanced and state-of-the-art wavelet-based open-source codec that can compete with reference ones, such as AOM AV1, HEVC, Google VP9, Xiph Daala.It introduces some innovations like, for example, a new fast wavelet transform, a new multistage residual coding, new compression & entropy coding schemes.The NHW codec is also royalty-free, and the NHW Project does not own patents.

A main feature of the NHW codec is that it is optmized for speed.The codec is actually a lot faster to encode/decode than the codecs above.It is also optimized for visual quality.The codec has a good amount of neatness and gracefully retains or improves image quality/sharpness, whereas the reference schemes tend to decrease image neatness/sharpness but keep a good amount of details and have a good precision in return.


To test it:

The current NHW version is a very first and experimental one.It allows to compress for the moment a 512x512 bitmap color image for quick test and demo purpose (will have to adapt it to any size and dimensions of image).
The wavelet transform is performed on the whole image, this is a difference with the DCT block-based transform that is used in reference codecs, such as JPEG for image.

Remark: If you classically want to compress a (larger) JPEG image, you can for example use Paint software under Windows to select the 512x512 part that interests you of the JPEG image (if larger) and also to save it as a bitmap color image.

Many thanks,
Raphael
nhwcodec at gmail.com