The patent issue is a major one and not lightly ignored. I haven't checked patent status, but one of the things that was pretty contentious with JPEG 2000 during the ISO standardization process was patents around arithmetic coding -- not just the method for doing the encoding, but also things like context based modeling.
In reality, the majority of image compression comes about in the "modeling" stage -- be it predictive coding, context based encoding coefficients, etc.
I'm happy to see new advances in image coding, but having spent many years working with Glen Langdon and others, the depth of IP concerns is still fairly fresh in my memory.
The patent issue is a major one and not lightly ignored. I haven't checked patent status, but one of the things that was pretty contentious with JPEG 2000 during the ISO standardization process was patents around arithmetic coding -- not just the method for doing the encoding, but also things like context based modeling.
In reality, the majority of image compression comes about in the "modeling" stage -- be it predictive coding, context based encoding coefficients, etc.
I'm happy to see new advances in image coding, but having spent many years working with Glen Langdon and others, the depth of IP concerns is still fairly fresh in my memory.