Lepton : An image compression technology from Dropbox which saves 22% losslessly !

We all are aware of image compression thing these days, its been a trend in the cloud computing industry so far. As of now at the time of writing Dropbox the leading cloud storage provider and a well known file hosting player has announced Lepton an open source project now under Apache License.

As per the announcement done on the Dropbox blog this is what it has to reveal

“Lepton achieves a 22% savings reduction for existing JPEG images, by predicting coefficients in JPEG blocks and feeding those predictions as context into an arithmetic coder. Lepton preserves the original file bit-for-bit perfectly. It compresses JPEG files at a rate of 5 megabytes per second and decodes them back to the original bits at 15 megabytes per second, securely, deterministic-ally, and in under 24 megabytes of memory.”

Dropbox seems to be claiming that it has encoded over 16 billion images, and are rapidly recoding the older images of the users as of now. Lepton has saved over petabytes of space which helps in reduction of bandwidth and saved cloud space which they rent via AWS(Amazon Web Services) !

As security being a major concern, Lepton uses seccomp, to disable all system calls except read and write of already-open file descriptors. seccomp (short for secure computing mode) is a computer security facility that provides an application sandboxing mechanism in the Linux kernel. The compressed files are placed into kernel-protected, read-only, memory before the bit-for-bit comparison to guarantee they are immutable during the full verification process.

[via:- blogs.dropbox.com/tech]