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From: patterso@deimos.ADS.COM (Tim J. Patterson)
Newsgroups: alt.fractals,comp.graphics
Subject: Re: How well does Barnsley's system perform?
Summary: comments on a very slim basis
Message-ID: <11486@deimos.ADS.COM>
Date: 6 Apr 90 22:39:05 GMT
References: <3166@usceast.UUCP> <1571@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Organization: Advanced Decision Systems
Lines: 26

In article <1571@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> seiler@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov writes:
>In article <3166@usceast.UUCP>, park@usceast.cs.scarolina.edu (Kihong Park) writes...
>>Has anybody seen published work by M. Barnsley(or a public demonstration)
>>corresponding to the performance of his image compression system based on
>>IFSs? Since natural images are in many instances non-fractal, I am particularly
>>interested in how his system fares w.r.t. the degree of faithfulness of the
>>reproduced image vs original image. That is, does his system of IFSs increase
>>drastically in size as more faithfulness is enforced? If there are enough 
>>responses, I will post a summary.
>
>If Barnsley can in fact produce what he claims, he may indeed have something.
>However, his methods seem to be cloaked in a veil of mystery, as he explains
>that he believes the success of his company depends on getting a working system
>on the market at least 6 months ahead of anyone else. When he was here at NASA
>Goddard over a year ago, he invited us to send a "non-expert" to his place,
>where he would demonstrate his system, allowing the visitor to twiddle knobs
>and such. He claimed that he could compress any image and retain full quality,
>__given enough processing time__. It appears that to him the quality is not an
>issue, but the time is. I believe he still has an offer where you can send him
>an image, and he will send back a compressed image and tell you how much it was


I've seen one of the images which was compressed 10,000 to one.  It
took a huge amount of time ( I vaguely recall days) to do the
compression. Overall quality was not very good but what do you expect
at that compression rate?