Better Portable Graphics


Better Portable Graphics is a file format for coding digital images, which was created by programmer Fabrice Bellard in 2014. He has proposed it as a replacement for the JPEG image format as the more compression-efficient alternative in terms of image quality or file size.
It is based on the intra-frame encoding of the High Efficiency Video Coding video compression standard. Tests on photographic images in July 2014 found that BPG produced smaller files for a given quality than JPEG, JPEG XR and WebP.
The format has been designed to be portable and work in low memory environments, and used in portable handheld and IoT devices, where those properties are particularly important. Current research works on designing and developing more energy-efficient BPG hardware which can then be integrated in portable devices such as digital cameras.
While there is no built-in native support for BPG in any mainstream browsers, websites can still deliver BPG images to all browsers by including a JavaScript library written by Bellard.

High Efficiency Video Coding and BPG

HEVC already has several profiles defined for still-picture coding using HEVC's intra-frame encoding for various bit depths and color formats, including the progressively more capable Main Still Picture, Main 4:4:4 Still Picture, and Main 4:4:4 16 Still Picture profiles.
BPG is essentially a wrapper for uses of the HEVC's Main 4:4:4 16 Still Picture profile up to 14 bits per sample.

Specifications

BPG's container format is intended to be more suited to a generic image format than the raw bitstream format used in HEVC.
BPG supports the color formats known as 4:4:4,, and. Support for a separately coded extra channel is also included for an alpha channel or the fourth channel of a CMYK image. Metadata support is included for Exif, ICC profiles, and XMP.
Color space support is included for YCbCr with ITU-R BT.601, BT.709, and BT.2020 definitions, YCgCo, RGB, CMYK, and grayscale.
Support for HEVC's lossy and lossless data compression is included.
BPG supports animation.

Patents

According to Bellard's site BPG may be covered by some of the patents on HEVC, but any device licensed to support HEVC will also be covered for BPG. Patent issues may prevent JPEG replacement by BPG despite BPG's better technical performance.

Other proposed JPEG replacements

Several previous image formats have also been proposed as JPEG replacements, including: