New Web Image Format

The Internet has become a place where images rule, and visually pleasing Web sites reign over the simpler, more text-based sites. With the increasing number of images, load times and file sizes have shot through the roof in some instances. LizardTech is reporting that its new image fomat, the DjVu, is the answer to those load time and file size problems.

The company touts that its file format compresses at a rate 150 times faster than that of the popular PDF format from Adobe, and as much as 20 times faster than the leading Web graphics formats JPEG and GIF.

DjVu achieves this level of compression by separating images into two logical components, the foreground and the background. Because the receiving end can decompress the parts very rapidly it makes the format useful, according to LizardTech's technical director Mark Weeks.

The technology to perform such compression was acquired from AT&T labs earlier this year, where LizardTech then ran with it to create several packages for commercial use.

Scanned documents such as pages from a book or articles can be made into OCR-enabled documents to allow keyword searching and faster transmission of documents.

For more information and to view DjVu documents you must visit LizardTech and download a small plugin.