Show HN: HiFiC – High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression – demo and paper
I've been waiting for something to implement this concept for <i>so long</i>, and I'm so happy to finally get a chance to explore how it works in practice!<p>It's really fascinating to zoom comparing the compressed version with the original -- the "general idea" is all there and the quality is roughly the same, but strands of hair move to different positions, skin pores are in a completely different pattern, etc. -- it's all regenerated to look "right", but at the lowest level the texture isn't "real".<p>Which is so fascinatingly different from JPEG or other lossy schemes -- the compression artifacts are obviously exactly that, you'd never confuse them for real detail. While here, you could never guess what is real detail vs. what is reconstructed detail.<p>My hunch is that this won't actually take off at first for images, because images on the internet don't use up <i>that</i> much of our bandwidth anyways, and the performance and model storage requirements here are huge.<p>BUT -- if the same idea can be applied to 1080p <i>video</i> with a temporal dimension, so that even if reconstructed textures are "false" they persist across frames, then suddenly the economics here would start to make sense: dedicated chips for encoding and decoding, with a built-in 10 GB model in ROM, trained on a decent proportion of every movie and TV show ever made... imagine if 2-hour movies were 200 MB instead of 2 GB?<p>(And once we have chips for video, they could be trivially re-used for still images, much like Apple reuses h.265 for HEIC.)