Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!bu.edu!shelby!mcnc!uvaarpa!murdoch!astsun7.astro.Virginia.EDU!gl8f
From: gl8f@astsun7.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d
Subject: Re: Compressing alt.sex.pictures files
Message-ID: <1990Aug29.211755.15899@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 29 Aug 90 21:17:55 GMT
References: <1990Aug28.192024.22435@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <1990Aug29.000054.28444@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <1990Aug29.154719.17301@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>
Sender: news@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU
Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
Lines: 18

In article <1990Aug29.154719.17301@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:

>Note that it is sufficient that the scheme found compress _realistic_image_
>data well; it doesn't have to compress random input at all well,

*Realistic* astronomical images contain a lot of gaussian noise. How
general do you want your algorithm to be?

As for other comments: I found in the "good old days" that ARC tended
to huffman-encode images instead of LZW, because it was smaller. The
"best" picture format on the ST is/was one called Tiny, which you can
ftp a description of from atari.archive.umich.edu in
~/atari/graphics/picfmts.doc. However, that format would suck shit on
an astronomical image. Adaptive huffman encoding might be your best
bet.

--
"Fuck you, Wumpus." -- Joe Stong