PIKTURE (PIK)

Fast. Small. Easy.

PIKTURE is a high-performance, lossless image format designed for systems where decoding speed and binary simplicity are critical. It is built on the FSE philosophy: Fast execution, Small file size, and Easy integration.

🚀 Why PIKTURE?

Standard formats like PNG are often bottlenecked by heavy decompression algorithms (DEFLATE/ZIP). PIKTURE replaces complex bit-shuffling with a hardware-friendly INDEX + Delta encoding. This allows the CPU to stream pixels directly to memory with minimal overhead, acting closer to a memory copy operation than a math-heavy decompression.

✨ Key Features

• Lossless: 100% bit-perfect reproduction of RGBA data.
• Ultra-Fast: Near-memcpy decoding speeds utilizing cache-friendly algorithms.
• Hardware Acceleration: Optional SIMD (AVX/NEON) and OpenMP multithreading support.
• Small Footprint: Two-file C library (.c / .h) with zero external dependencies.
• Endian-Aware: Cross-architecture compatibility (Little-Endian / Big-Endian).
• Smart Alpha: Automatically optimizes storage when transparency is not used.

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📊 Performance Comparison

Benchmark results for loading a 5K professional image (Sample dimensions: 5120x2880):

Format	Load Time	Dimensions
PIK	0.111735 sec	5120x2880
PNG	0.193990 sec	5120x2880

PIKTURE decodes nearly 2x faster than standard PNG implementations on the same hardware without SIMD or OpenMP.

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🛠️ Implementation & Usage

The core library consists of only two files:

• pikture.h - Contains the data structures (pikture_t) and public API declarations.
• pikture.c - Contains the core encoding/decoding logic, hashing, and byte-stream processing.

Basic API Example

Integrating PIKTURE into your C/C++ project is trivial:

#include "pikture.h"
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    // Load an image
    pikture_t* img = pikture_load("image.pik");
    if (!img) {
        printf("Failed to load image!\n");
        return 1;
    }

    printf("Loaded %dx%d image.\n", img->width, img->height);

    // Save an image
    pikture_save("output.pik", img);

    // Free memory
    pikture_free(img);
    return 0;
}

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⚙️ Building & Compilation

The project is designed to be highly portable. You can compile it using standard GCC/Clang or cross-compile it using the Zig toolchain.

Build Scripts

# Run the build script to generate static and shared libraries
./build.sh   # UNIX (macOS / Linux)
./build.bat  # WINDOWS

Advanced Compilation Flags

You can enable hardware-specific optimizations by passing the following preprocessor directives during compilation:

• -DPIKT_USE_SIMD : Enables vectorized instructions (AVX/SSE for x86_64, NEON for ARM64) to process multiple pixels per clock cycle.
• -DPIKT_USE_THREADS : Enables OpenMP multithreading. Divides the decoding/encoding workload across multiple CPU cores (perfect for large 4K/8K images).

Example compilation with optimizations (GCC):

gcc -O3 -DPIKT_USE_SIMD -DPIKT_USE_THREADS -fopenmp main.c pikture.c -o myapp

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🔬 Technical Specification

PIKTURE is a binary format. All multi-byte integers in the header are stored in Big-Endian format.

1. File Header (11 Bytes)

Offset	Size	Type	Description
0x00	4 bytes	char[4]	Magic bytes: "PIK!"
0x04	1 byte	uint8_t	Version number (Currently 101)
0x05	2 bytes	uint16_t	Image Width
0x07	2 bytes	uint16_t	Image Height
0x09	1 byte	uint8_t	Bit Depth (Currently 32 for RGBA)
0x0A	1 byte	uint8_t	Endianness flag (0 = Little, 1 = Big)

2. Byte-Stream Protocol

Immediately following the header is the compressed pixel data payload. PIKTURE uses a custom command-byte protocol combined with a 64-color Least Recently Used (LRU) cache:

• 0x00 - 0x3F (INDEX): Fetch the exact pixel from the 64-color LRU cache.
• 0x40 - 0x7F (DIFF): Apply small RGB deltas (differences from the previous pixel).
• 0x80 - 0xBF (LUMA): Apply green-relative color deltas (highly efficient for gradients).
• 0xC0 - 0xFD (RUN): Repeat the exact same previous pixel N times (Run-Length Encoding).
• 0xFE (RGB): Full 24-bit color change (Alpha remains unchanged). Followed by 3 bytes (R, G, B).
• 0xFF (RGBA): Full 32-bit color change. Followed by 4 bytes (R, G, B, A).

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📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. Free to use, modify, and distribute for personal and commercial purposes.