[webkit-dev] WebKit runtime image compression

[Paul Pedriana]

For a lot of web pages, images are the primary source of memory usage. 
These images seem to be typically stored as RGB or ARGB data in the 
BitmapImage class. It seems to me that applications that wish or need to 
save runtime memory could benefit from runtime image compression whereby 
images are stored in some compressed form instead of RGB or ARGB 
formats. I am currently looking into this possibility and I'm wondering 
if anybody has previously looked into it.

My current idea is to support two kinds of compressed images: RLE and 
YCoCg-DXT5. The former could be for any images that are simple enough, 
and the latter could be for general images and give a fixed 4:1 
compression ratio. RGB transforms to YCoCg with better decorrelation 
(breakdown of RGB to YCC) than YCbCr and many images can get PSNR values 
over 40 (i.e. hard to tell from original). If the computer has decent 
vector processing or a programmable GPU, the performance could be 
decent, otherwise it depends on the CPU. (A)RGB could of course remain 
as a fallback.

I'm wondering if anybody has looked into runtime image compression with 
WebKit and considered options such as this.

Thanks.