Animated GIF optimization by adaptive color local table management

TL;DR

This paper introduces a parametric optimization method for animated GIFs that reduces file size by optimizing local color tables and color remapping, maintaining visual quality and enhancing storage efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel optimization technique based on local color table selection and color remapping for animated GIFs, preserving format compatibility and improving compression.

Findings

Significant byte reduction achieved in tests

Limited or no perceived color quality loss

Effective on diverse GIF datasets

Abstract

After thirty years of the GIF file format, today is becoming more popular than ever: being a great way of communication for friends and communities on Instant Messengers and Social Networks. While being so popular, the original compression method to encode GIF images have not changed a bit. On the other hand popularity means that storage saving becomes an issue for hosting platforms. In this paper a parametric optimization technique for animated GIFs will be presented. The proposed technique is based on Local Color Table selection and color remapping in order to create optimized animated GIFs while preserving the original format. The technique achieves good results in terms of byte reduction with limited or no loss of perceived color quality. Tests carried out on 1000 GIF files demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimization strategy.