This change slightly improves compression ratio and compression time.
Explanation:
The efficiency of the Crunch encoding scheme depends on the similarity between the neighbour chunks. For this reason in original version of Crunch the order of chunks is reversed after each scanline, so that there is no jump from one side of the image to another at the image borders. The problem here is that inside of each chunk, the blocks are normally ordered in a usual up-to-down-left-to-right manner, regardless of the chunk scanning order. While on the forward scan we normally need to perform diagonal jumps (+1, +1) in order to get to the next chunk, on the reverse scan we normally need to perform much larger (-3, +1) jumps, which usually defeats the advantage of not having discontinuity at the image borders.
Note:
This modification alters the output format and makes it incompatible with the previous revisions.
Testing:
The modified algorithm has been tested on the Kodak test set using 64-bit build with default settings (running on Windows 10, i7-4790, 3.6GHz). All the decompressed test images are identical to the images being compressed and decompressed using original version of Crunch.
[Compressing Kodak set without mipmaps]
Original: 1582222 bytes / 28.882 sec
Modified: 1579618 bytes / 28.743 sec
Improvement: 0.16% (compression ratio) / 0.48% (compression time)
[Compressing Kodak set with mipmaps]
Original: 2065243 bytes / 36.920 sec
Modified: 2061499 bytes / 36.833 sec
Improvement: 0.18% (compression ratio) / 0.24% (compression time)
Alexander Suvorov
Rich Geldreich
richgel99@gmail.com