[video-codec] NHW Project - state-of-the-art for high quality

[Raphael Canut <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I contacted you quickly about the NHW Project as I wanted to reach the
professionals in image/video compression.

This last month I maybe re-oriented the NHW Project to high quality (up to
-l9 quality setting), and I made quite large visual tests on many images
(at -l9, -l5, -l3 and -h3 quality settings), and my conclusion is that
clearly the NHW Project is visually better than AOM AV1 (AVIF) and HEVC at
high quality, -because it has more neatness-.

I have also worked these last months with a swiss engineer and have adapted
the NHW Project to power of 2 square tiles, and so now we can decompose any
image size into square tiles.Don't have coded a deblocking filter for now
but I suspect that the major drawback of this approach will be artifacts at
tile boundaries, notably at high compression...

The ideal would be to adapt directly the NHW Project to the whole image
dimensions (and not decompose into tiles), but this is a bigger task... and
in fact I contacted you because as it seems confirmed that the NHW Project
is very good and extremely competitive at high quality/mid compression,
would there be companies/organizations that could sponsorize me to adapt
the NHW Project to any image size (would require a cheap 3 to 6 months
contract) and maybe want to push a little further the NHW Project?

The other advantages of the NHW Project are that it is new royalty-free
technology, and it is very fast to compute (encode/decode), a lot faster
than AVIF and HEVC for example.

Again, if you find there is some interest in the NHW Project, I am really
looking for a company to back the NHW Project, which will help a lot to
give the project weight in organizations and comitties like JPEG and
Alliance for Open Media.

Looking forward some further development,

Cheers,
Raphael Canut