by R Engels, A Sendillnathan, Aravind Krishnaswamy, B Arun Shenbaga Kumar (Author)
Chemba found a used copy of our college project report for sale on Amazon.com.
The seller is listed as 'vegasbookstore', who appears to have a good rating, so this doesnt appear to be a farce. See extract below from Amazon:
Seller: vegasbookstore
98% positive over the past 12 months (574 ratings.) 668 lifetime ratings. Shipping: In Stock. Ships from NV, United States Expedited shipping available. International shipping available. See shipping rates.
The mystery - how did this bookstore get a copy of our project report? And, who did they think would ever buy it for $499.95? ;-)
And in case you were wondering what the hell the long winded title means, fractal image compression was a novel technique back in the late 80s/early 90s that competed with JPEG. (And yes, complex project titles helped garner brownie points with the profs).
Our project focused on applying the IFS techniques to video images. The compression ratios were very high (1:100 and higher), but the speed of compression and quality were poor. We experimented with parallelizing our algorithm on PARAM and the IBM SP2 32-node cluster, which yielded some performance improvements.
If you've been around in the industry long enough, you might recall JPEG gained popularity partly due a faster decompression technique, but also due to the political power of the joint photographers group.
So, would we have made it big had JPEG not won out? Probably not, but it was an interesting project. And oh, I still have my project report with me. Not for sale however, thank you.