The Quite OK Image Format for microcontrollers #microcontrollers #graphics
Erik Corry discusses the simple fact that Supporting images in embedded devices can be difficult. Framebuffers for high resolution displays can be too big for many microcontrollers.
There are lots of reasons to support standard image formats that have nice tools available for content generation. But the standard image formats are getting more and more bloated and their memory requirements are often unrealistic for small devices. The PNG spec is over 30k words. And decoding it requires a full deflate implementation where the amount of state needed while decompressing can be up to 32k…
That’s why I was excited to see the new image format, The Quite OK Image Format. It’s extremely simple and fast to decode. It offers acceptable compression ratios (not quite as good as PNG) and doesn’t need much code to support it. And best of all, the decompression state is little more than 256 bytes.
The format is evolving fast and won’t settle down until just before the 2021 holidays. It is MIT licensed.
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