Objective Evaluation of WebP Image Compression Efficiency

Performances of multimedia coding techniques are still improving in terms of compression ratio, coding features, and robustness against errors even if at a slower pace with respect to what we were used to up a decade ago. One of the latest codec which is expected to improve on the state of the art is the WebP algorithm released by Google. With the intent to evaluate the extent of this improvement, in this paper we provide an objective evaluation of the compression efficiency of WebP, by comparing it with alternative algorithms. From the results it appears that the performance of the proposed codec is in line with that of the alternative methods, without achieving any major improvement and lacking several features.