Sort of related, but what's the story with fractal image compression? When I was at university (~20 years ago) there was a lot of research going in to it, with great promises heralded for web-based image transfer. There was a Netscape plugin that handled them. They seemed to just disappear in the early 2000s.
I think this paper was part of it, which showed that the advantages of fractal image compression could equivalently be achieved with smooth wavelets and efficient representation of zerotrees, except with a lot more speed and flexibility (sorry no PDF): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5585498_A_wavelet-b...
Seems to have been patent-encumbered and largely abandoned in the commercial world, but there is a FOSS library called fiasco (.wfa files) that is included with netpbm, available on most *NIX systems.
New formats are generally a huge pain in the media worlds... Huge companies like Google have been trying to get webp for years and it's still not there, and it's also why they're still putting so much effort into png/jpg.
It's been a while sense I read about fractal image compression, but way back when, I read quite a bit about it. The impression I got about the algorithms I read about was that a) the term "fractal" seemed like a bit of a stretch, and b) they were a neat hack for building and exploiting a statistical model of an image, but the promises that were getting thrown around were pretty overblown. My guess is that these techniques would be blown out of the water by modern CNN-based methods.
My impression was that a fractured landscape of patents and some encoding performance issues doomed fractal image compression. Add rapidly expanding bandwidth and the need for better image compression dried up. DCT and related techniques were good enough to make it a tough market to enter and compete with. I could be way off base though.
