Customer Reviews

Compressed Image File Formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, XBM, BMP

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I had the opportunity to examine this book both in manuscript and published form, and I must say that I am quite impressed. It provides good overview and detailed implementation notes with source code examples for a variety of image formats. The chapters dedicated to JPEG explore many aspects of the standard and offer suggested implementation notes for both compression and decompression, and the book would be valuable based on this information alone. The remaining chapters discuss the common GIF format and its patent-free successor (PNG) as well as other compressed image formats in regular use. Source code examples in C++ are included in the enclosed CD-ROM along with sample images. In summary, Miano's book provides a sturdy reference for graphics programmers or anyone interested in the details of today's most popular image formats.

I thought I would respond to the negative comment regarding JFIF files. As the reader points out, the sample source code on the CD checks for the JFIF header. This reason for this is to be an educational excercise in file formats. As the reader points out, this causes the source code not to work with JPEG files from digital cameras that do not use the JFIF format. The difference between these formats is simply the use of APPn markers (essentially comments).

To make the book source code work with these files you simply need to comment out one line of code -- the place where it checks for the existance JFIF header.

If you know very little about the technical aspects of file formats, and you want to write your own applications, then this is the book you are looking for.

BUT, if you have limited experience in programming (visual C++ eg.) then this might not be the book for you. Don't expect full source code, it only shows you the way to do it (and adequatly at that). You really need to know the basics of data structures and dictionaries otherwise you won't go much further as reading/writing bitmaps.

Also a bit of knowledge about discrete cosine (Fourier) transforms really helps, otherwise JPEG seems like a magic formulae (and I alway want to know what I'm doing :)

But all in all this is a great book to start from, it really contains all the information you need to handle(read.write):
-BMP
-GIF
-JPG
-PNG files.
Another reviewer complained about incompleteness of the JPEG section, but this standard is so vast that a complete volume could be written about it. The book covers the JFIF file format which 99.9% of the file on the web are.

Enjoy this book! and no, I'm NOT the author!:)

This book is about the last one written on the subject of graphics file formats, because this information can be found on the web and also because the number of image file formats and details necessary to write a meaningful book would result in a tome of mammoth size. The author of this little book did things right - he just picked five graphics file formats and covered them well. Chapter one is just a quick introduction to various aspects of graphics file formats and an introduction to terminology so you will understand why compressed image file formats work the way that they do in general.

Next the book gets into the file formats themselves by starting with one of the simplest file format to code and decode, Windows BMP. The next file format covered is the very simplest in the book - XBM. This file is also almost always used in the Windows environment. The next eight chapters and 135 pages are dedicated to explaining the JPEG format. Even the author admits that you will need to resort to outside references if you want to fully implement and understand the standard, but he gets you 90% of the way there. He restricts himself to explaining only sequential and progressive JPEG with Huffman coding and 8-bit samples. The author also does a great job of explaining the DCT, which is the basis of the JPEG format. If you haven't been able to find a good explanation of the DCT, try this book. The next chapter in the book is on GIF, and the author explains not only how to decode and encode the format, he also discusses the legal problems that have pretty much put an end to commercial GIF encoder/decoder development. The last three chapters are dedicated to the PNG file format and how to encode and decode them. Each chapter ends with a conclusion that tells you what you should have gotten out of that particular chapter and pseudocode is presented for each algorithm explained. The author expects that you already know how to program and that detailed implementation in a high level language is something you can handle. However, the author has thoughtfully included a CD with C++ source code implementing the vast majority of the algorithms described in the book. Thus if you buy a used copy make sure you get one with the CD, or you are missing much of the value of the book.

I am using this book to build my own toy jpeg encoder/decoder. So far, so good. The book takes quite a bit of study but teaches jpeg really well (I haven't read about PNG or the other formats yet). You don't necessarily need to know high level math to follow the book either, and the book has a lot of helpful bits of code.

One important note is to make sure to look at the book's errata here:
[...]
I got stuck with an algorithm on page 70 of the book that was updated in the errata on that website.

Several years ago, I received a grant to study steganography, which is the process of embedding secret messages in ordinary messages. In my case, I was working on changing the incidental bit values in image files so that they stored messages. Doing this requires a complete understanding of how the image files are stored and I used this book as my primary resource. From it, I found it easy to learn the basic bit patterns and structures used to store images and with that, I could write programs to manipulate the image files. Later, when I was teaching a course in computer security, one of the major exercises was in decrypting messages hidden in image files. My work in this area was presented at a national computer conference.
Over the last two years, I supervised a research project with a student where he used neural networks to identify image files that contained text messages. The goal was to identify junk e-mail messages (spam) that were images of text. Such image files were used to defeat filters that would flag spam messages based on the presence of keywords. When he started the project, the first thing I did was give him a copy of this book so that he could understand the structure of the image files and learn what to code for. His project was a success; he presented his work at a regional computer conference.
This book presents the structure of the primary types of image files in a manner that is easy to understand. As I have already mentioned, it was a primary resource for two successful research projects, so if you need to know the structure of image files, this is the first book that I would recommend.

I was looking for a book on JPEG files so I could write a program to compress jpeg files for internet use. After reading this book I did come away with some insight on how JPEG compresssion works, however, the code examples in the book only work with JFIF JPEG files. The book says that JFIF format is the most commonly used, but I was unable to compress many of the pictures on my computer...

Not helpful that the author reviews his own book and gives himself 5 stars! Before he did so, the average rating was 3.33 stars. Afterwards it became 3.75 stars. My rating aims to rectify matters. I have not, however, read the book.

JPEG compression and decompression, PNG and GIF