Add AVIF support

[JRM]

Hi,

We would appreciate if Agisoft could extend its support to the AVIF format for imagery, we are considering it for our aerial and drone pictures instead of JP2 and JPEG because it already have a wider application support (Chrome, Firefox, Windows 10) than the first and a better compression rate/quality than the second.

A few benchmarks :
https://netflixtechblog.com/avif-for-next-generation-image-coding-b1d75675fe4
https://reachlightspeed.com/blog/using-the-new-high-performance-avif-image-format-on-the-web-today/

For those of us having to manage a few millions jpeg, this format is interesting

[DavidD]

I deeply agree with this!
AVIF is clearly the best competitor to replace JPG in the long run, given it's clear licensing and wide support through all AV1 members both in hardware and software.
The gains in compression, features and quality are very remarkable and more and more software already supports AV1.

This would be an extremely welcomed addition!

[JRM]

Hi,

libavif is providing avifenc and avifdec, it is developed by netflix under a BSD license :
https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif

Our benchmarks shows an excellent ssim rating when we aim to halve the file size of a JPEG source (Q99), it is possible to go lower without noticeable loss.

[DavidD]

There are also a Go-based version: https://github.com/Kagami/go-avif
or one, which uses the popular dav1d decoder from the VLC team: https://github.com/link-u/davif

Is there any chance you could look into that for a potential additional feature in an upcoming point release, @Alexey Pasumansky?

[DavidD]

In fact, another very viable option would be JPEG XL, which has a couple of benefits over AVIF:

• Transcode JPEG images without loss of quality
• Much faster encoding/deciding speed
• Larger image dimension supported (AVIF only 8k x 4k)

with the same benefits as AVIF: Royalty-free, Much better compression than 'old' standards, more feature complete.

And the standard was succesfully finallized now.

One thing that comes to mind, which could be beneficial for AVIF is that the hardware encoders/decoders are much more matured and will probably be on most CPUs within the next 2 years. No such thing with JPEG XL yet.

 

[JRM]

The dimension limit you are mentioning must belongs to the implementation you are using, I just encoded  an avif 10336x7788 with aom/avifenc

[DavidD]

Okay, I stand corrected. Seems like I had outdated information. What do you think about de/encoding speeds?

[DavidD]

Seems like there's another very promising image format coming.
According to the latest changelogs, experimental support for JPG XL was added. I'm actually quite happy with that!