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WebP is an image format employing both lossy and lossless compression. It is currently developed by Google, based on technology acquired with the purchase of On2 Technologies. As a derivative of the VP8 video format, it is a sister project to the WebM multimedia container format. WebP-related software is released under a BSD license. The format was first announced in 2010 as a new open standard for lossily compressed true-color graphics on the web, producing smaller files of comparable image quality to the older JPEG scheme. On October 3, 2011 Google announced WebP support for animation, ICC profile, XMP metadata and tiling (compositing very large images from maximum 16384×16384 tiles).〔(WebP-Mux (RIFF based container) framework )〕 On November 18, 2011 Google began to experiment with lossless compression and support for transparency (alpha channel) in both lossless and lossy modes; support has been enabled by default in libwebp 0.2.0 (August 16, 2012).〔(WebP v0.2.0 decoder and encoder source tree )〕〔(Google Developers Blog: Lossless and Transparency Modes in WebP )〕 According to Google's measurements, a conversion from PNG to WebP results in a 45% reduction in file size when starting with PNGs found on the web, and a 28% reduction compared to PNGs that are recompressed with pngcrush and pngout.〔(Google Code blog: Lossless and transparency encoding in WebP )〕 Google has proposed using WebP for animated images as an alternative to the popular GIF format, citing the advantages of 24-bit color with transparency, combining frames with lossy and lossless compression in the same animation, and as well as support for seeking to specific frames. Google reports a 64% reduction in file size for images converted from animated GIFs to lossy WebP, and a 19% reduction when converted to lossless WebP. == Technology == WebP's lossy compression algorithm is based on the intra-frame coding of the VP8 video format and the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) as a container format.〔 As such, it is a block-based transformation scheme with eight bits of color depth and a luminance-chrominance model with chroma subsampling by a ratio of 1:2 (YCbCr 4:2:0). Without further content, the mandatory RIFF container has an overhead of only twenty bytes, though it can also hold additional metadata.〔 The side length of WebP images is limited to 16383 pixels.〔 WebP is based on block prediction. Each block is predicted on the values from the three blocks above it and from one block to the left of it (block decoding is done in raster-scan order: left to right and top to bottom). There are four basic modes of block prediction: horizontal, vertical, DC (one color), and TrueMotion. Mispredicted data and non-predicted blocks are compressed in a 4×4 pixel sub-block with a discrete cosine transform or a Walsh–Hadamard transform. Both transforms are done with fixed-point arithmetic to avoid rounding errors. The output is compressed with entropy encoding.〔 WebP also has explicit support for parallel decoding.〔 The reference implementation consists of converter software in the form of a command-line program for Linux (cwebp) and a programming library for the decoding, the same as for WebM. The open source community quickly managed to port the converter to other platforms, such as Windows. WebP’s lossless compression uses advanced techniques such as dedicated entropy codes for different color channels, exploiting 2D locality of backward reference distances and a color cache of recently used colors. This complements basic techniques such as dictionary coding, Huffman coding and color indexing transform.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「WebP」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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