Apple Re-invented Image Compression with AI: Same Quality, One-Third the File Size
Apple’s PICO: An AI-Powered Image Codec That Cuts File Size by Two-Thirds at Equal Perceived Quality
In 2025, JPEG AI became the first international standard for learned image compression. However, it, like most codecs, still prioritizes mathematical metrics like PSNR over true perceptual quality—what the human eye finds pleasing.
Apple researchers have introduced PICO (Perceptual Image Codec), a neural codec designed to optimize for human perception. It tackles key practical challenges: 1) Speed: A novel "one-shot context model" accelerates entropy encoding without sacrificing compression efficiency. 2) Artifacts: A dedicated TextFidelity loss preserves text clarity, and a TilingArtifact loss eliminates color seams between image tiles processed in parallel. 3) Control: It avoids the "hallucinations" common in GAN-based perceptual models.
In a large-scale human evaluation (74,925 comparisons), PICO achieved the same perceived quality as standards like AV1, VVC, and JPEG AI while using only 30-43% of the bitrate. It also outperforms other learned perceptual codecs by 20-40%. Remarkably, it runs in 230ms (encode) and 150ms (decode) on an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
While less efficient on synthetic graphics, PICO represents a significant shift from optimizing mathematical scores to directly targeting human visual experience, making high-quality perceptual compression practical for consumer devices. The work builds on expertise from WaveOne, whose team joined Apple and previously advanced neural video compression.
marsbit05/30 02:47
