Show HN: HiFiC – High-Fidelity Generative Image Compression – demo and paper
I've been waiting for something to implement this concept for so long, and I'm so happy to finally get a chance to explore how it works in practice!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".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.My hunch is that this won't actually take off at first for images, because images on the internet don't use up that much of our bandwidth anyways, and the performance and model storage requirements here are huge.BUT -- if the same idea can be applied to 1080p video 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?(And once we have chips for video, they could be trivially re-used for still images, much like Apple reuses h.265 for HEIC.)