Support for JPEG-XL compression

[RaananHadar]

JPEG-XL is a state of the art open source compression algorithm that can be extremely useful for raster data, supporting fast encoding and decoding on CPU and good compression ratios and ofcourse, being open source. GDAL recently added JPEG-XL support for geotiff and I really believe that incorporating a strong, state of the art compression algorithm would increase the appeal of TileDB compared to other image formats.

Please do consider 🙏

[normanb]

@RaananHadar We are planning to add a WebP compressor very shortly, this is work that the core team is doing now. WebP offers a lot of compression and image quality advantages over legacy JPEG. As you have note, JPEG-XL support is getting adopted and we will do a comparison of compression / image quality ratios with WebP once that is available in TileDB.

[n-orlov]

Hey @normanb, How is it going with this feature? Is it still the plan to release it? We're really looking forward to have it to try using TileDB for our imaging workloads.

[ihnorton]

@n-orlov we've merged WebP support in #3549. We will have a release candidate out next week, with release 2.13 soon thereafter.

[RaananHadar]

I understand the logic of going with common formats vs. adopting the bleeding edge. There are many shortcomings that are left with WebP that still allow formats such as JPEG 2000 and JPEG-XL to flourish in a more scientific and data application vs. WebP which is more of a general consumption format for the web. An easy distinguishing feature is supporting images with more than 8 bits of dynamic range. As TileDB aims to support scientific and data applications I would recommend aiming for such formats. See my comment for JPEG-XL in COGs above via GDAL.