Latest News
15.12.2020
Final leaderboards published! Meet the winners.
27.11.2020
Submissions are closed. Results to be announced by December 15!
13.11.2020
Leaderboards updated.
This is the last interim update. The deadline for new and updated submissions is November 20 at midnight (GMT).
This is the last interim update. The deadline for new and updated submissions is November 20 at midnight (GMT).
About the Competition
This competition focuses on the advantages of algorithms and their implementations for universal lossless data compression rather than for certain data types. We test compressors under the following scenarios:
Test 1: Qualitative-data compression
This year we use text data.
Test 2: Quantitative-data compression
The test set for this year contains images, most of which are photographic.
Test 3: Mixed-data compression
This year's focus is on slightly preprocessed executable files (we removed incompressible chunks).
Test 4: Small-block-data compression
We use small blocks of textual and mixed data to evaluate how compressors behave when the data size is severely limited, such as in block-storage systems.
About the Competition
This competition focuses on the advantages of algorithms and their implementations for universal lossless data compression rather than for certain data types. We test compressors under the following scenarios:
Test 1: Qualitative-data compression
This year we use text data.
Test 2: Quantitative-data compression
The test set for this year contains images, most of which are photographic.
Test 3: Mixed-data compression
This year's focus is on slightly preprocessed executable files (we removed incompressible chunks).
Test 4: Small-block-data compression
We use small blocks of textual and mixed data to evaluate how compressors behave when the data size is severely limited, such as in block-storage systems.
We impose speed limits to separate each of these four tests into three subcategories: rapid compression, balanced compression and high compression ratio (HCR). All told, the result is 12 categories and leaderboards, each with its own prizes.
Board of Experts
Alexander (Alex) Rhatushnyak
A PhD developing data-compression algorithms since the 1990s. Coauthor of a book and patents on data compression, co-creator of the JPEG-XL standard, and multiple-time winner of the Hutter Prize and Calgary Corpus Compression Challenge—the only ongoing competitions (before ours) in lossless data compression.
Eugene Shelwien
Developer of recompression algorithms for Deflate, JPEG, MP3, AAC, proprietary audio codecs and the .pa compression format. Administrator of Encode.su, the biggest international forum covering data-compression algorithms and software.
Dmitriy Vatolin
A PhD, video-codec developer and coauthor of a book on data compression. Supervisor of collaborative video- and image-processing research projects that include Broadcom, Huawei, Intel, RealNetworks, Samsung and other leading companies. Instructs courses on methods of 3D and 2D video and image processing and compression.
Schedule
19.06.2020
19.06.2020
Start accepting submissions
30.06.2020
30.06.2020
Test set fixed
40% of test set available to participants
40% of test set available to participants
About every month
About every month
Leaderboards updated
20.11.2020
20.11.2020
Deadline for new and updated submissions
27.11.2020
27.11.2020
Deadline for settling any technical issues affecting submitted compressors
15.12.2020
15.12.2020
Winners and results announced
Test sets fully disclosed
Test sets fully disclosed
Awards for Each Category
Second place
1,000 EUR and award certificate
First place
3,000 EUR and award certificate
Third place
Honorable mention certificate (no monetary prize)
Awards for Each Category
First place
3,000 EUR and award certificate
Second place
1,000 EUR and award certificate
Third place
Honorable mention certificate (no monetary prize)
We're also reserving 2,000 EUR for additional rewards in case of ties or other difficult situations.
Prize Winners
TEST 1: TEXT
TEST 2: IMAGES
TEST 3: MIXED
TEST 4: BLOCK
Rapid
1st place:
Peter Thamm, pglz
2nd place:
Konstantinos Agiannis, agiannis_text
3rd place:
Frederic Langlet, k5
Peter Thamm, pglz
2nd place:
Konstantinos Agiannis, agiannis_text
3rd place:
Frederic Langlet, k5
Balanced
1st place:
Peter Thamm, pgcm
2nd place:
Mathieu Chartier, MCM
3rd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, DURILCA'light
Peter Thamm, pgcm
2nd place:
Mathieu Chartier, MCM
3rd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, DURILCA'light
HCR*
1st place:
Dmitry Shkarin, DURILCA
2nd place:
Peter Thamm, sgcm
3rd place:
Mathieu Chartier, MCM
Dmitry Shkarin, DURILCA
2nd place:
Peter Thamm, sgcm
3rd place:
Mathieu Chartier, MCM
Rapid
1st place:
Andreas Debski, Kvick
2nd place:
Peter Thamm, pglz
3rd place:
Konstantinos Agiannis, agiannis_image
Andreas Debski, Kvick
2nd place:
Peter Thamm, pglz
3rd place:
Konstantinos Agiannis, agiannis_image
Balanced
1st place:
Marcio Pais, LEA
2nd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, BMF
3rd place:
Andreas Debski, Kvick
Marcio Pais, LEA
2nd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, BMF
3rd place:
Andreas Debski, Kvick
HCR*
1st place:
Marcio Pais, EMMA
2nd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, BMF
3rd place:
Marcio Pais, LEA
Marcio Pais, EMMA
2nd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, BMF
3rd place:
Marcio Pais, LEA
Rapid
1st place:
Peter Thamm, pglz
2nd place:
Sebastian.LUPANE, LZNV
3rd place:
Frederic Langlet, k5
Peter Thamm, pglz
2nd place:
Sebastian.LUPANE, LZNV
3rd place:
Frederic Langlet, k5
Balanced
1st place:
Peter Thamm, pgcm
2nd place:
Marcio Pais, KATY
3rd place:
Mathieu Chartier, MCM
Peter Thamm, pgcm
2nd place:
Marcio Pais, KATY
3rd place:
Mathieu Chartier, MCM
HCR*
1st place:
Marcio Pais, LILY
2nd place:
Peter Thamm, sgcm
3rd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, DURILCA'base
Marcio Pais, LILY
2nd place:
Peter Thamm, sgcm
3rd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, DURILCA'base
Rapid
1st place:
Peter Thamm, pglz
2nd place:
Frederic Langlet, k5
3rd place:
Ilya Muravyov, ULZ
Peter Thamm, pglz
2nd place:
Frederic Langlet, k5
3rd place:
Ilya Muravyov, ULZ
Balanced
1st place:
Peter Thamm, pgcm
2nd place:
Marcio Pais, LUNA
3rd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, PPMd
Peter Thamm, pgcm
2nd place:
Marcio Pais, LUNA
3rd place:
Dmitry Shkarin, PPMd
HCR*
1st place:
Dmitry Shkarin, PPMonstr
2nd place:
Marcio Pais, NINO
3rd place:
Peter Thamm, sgcm
Dmitry Shkarin, PPMonstr
2nd place:
Marcio Pais, NINO
3rd place:
Peter Thamm, sgcm
* HCR stands for high compression ratio
1st place: 3,000 EUR and award certificate
2nd place: 1,000 EUR and award certificate
3rd place: Honorable mention certificate (no monetary prize)
2nd place: 1,000 EUR and award certificate
3rd place: Honorable mention certificate (no monetary prize)
Leaderboards
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General Notes
- The leaderboard tables below contain results for contest submissions and selected publicly available compressors. The names of submitted compressors appear in boldface.
- See "Ranking" for rules governing how we order the results.
- When possible, we set compressor options to use just one thread for publicly available compressors. Some programs, however, may (and did) use multiple threads. Because we declined to fine-tune presets to fit the speed limits as tightly as possible, the compressors are not aligned by speed. Therefore, these results SHOULD NOT be used to draw conclusions about publicly available compressors such as "compressor X is better than compressor Y."
- HCR stands for "High Compression Ratio".
Ranking
For the "balanced" and "high compression ratio" categories we rank compressors according to the following metric:
c_full_size = compressed-data size + compressed-decompressor size
First place goes to the compressor with the smallest c_full_size.
We compress decompressors using bzip2 v.1.0.8 with the "-9" setting.
For the rapid categories we rank according to the function:
f = c_time + 2·d_time + 1/10⁶·c_full_size,
where c_time and d_time are, respectively, the compression and decompression times in seconds, and c_full_size is in bytes.
First place goes to the compressor with the smallest value for f.
c_full_size = compressed-data size + compressed-decompressor size
First place goes to the compressor with the smallest c_full_size.
We compress decompressors using bzip2 v.1.0.8 with the "-9" setting.
For the rapid categories we rank according to the function:
f = c_time + 2·d_time + 1/10⁶·c_full_size,
where c_time and d_time are, respectively, the compression and decompression times in seconds, and c_full_size is in bytes.
First place goes to the compressor with the smallest value for f.
Table Additional Notes
The compressors that fell just short of a given speed category appear at the bottom of the corresponding table. Submissions that failed to fully comply with the rules (in particular, the rule that every compressor must correctly decode the compressed files for all four tests) are also at the bottom.
Most compressors in the table underwent testing on a machine running Windows 10 64-bit (except agiannis_image, agiannis_text, archbox, BWIC, guess, k5, Orz, pgcm, pglz, sgcm, TBCM which underwent testing on a machine running Ubuntu 18.04), with the machine configuration described in Test Hardware.
Most compressors in the table underwent testing on a machine running Windows 10 64-bit (except agiannis_image, agiannis_text, archbox, BWIC, guess, k5, Orz, pgcm, pglz, sgcm, TBCM which underwent testing on a machine running Ubuntu 18.04), with the machine configuration described in Test Hardware.
Notes on Compressors
- lzuf2 appears unranked in the table because it failed to correctly process all four test sets as the rules require
- mcm 0.84 froze while decoding Test 3 data for both the -t11 and -x11 presets
- nanozip 0.09 with the -cc -m26g -p1 -t1 -nm preset failed to correctly decode Test 3 data
- Zstd was modified for Test 4 to comply with our API: it employed the functions ZSTD_createCCtx, ZSTD_compressCCtx, ZSTD_createDCtx and ZSTD_decompressDCtx from the zstd API; it was compiled using x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc; and the ZSTD_compressCCtx function took the number from the preset column as an argument
- zlib was modified for Test 4 to comply with our API: it employed the functions compress2 and uncompress from the zlib API, it was compiled using x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc, and the compress2 function took the number from the preset column as an argument
- lz4 was modified for Test 4 to comply with our API: it employed the functions LZ4_compress_HC and LZ4_decompress_safe from the lz4 API, it was compiled using x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc, and the LZ4_compress_HC function took the number from the preset column as an argument
- ZPAQ was modified for Test 4 to comply with our API: it employed the functions libzpaq::compress and libzpaq::decompress from the ZPAQ API, it was compiled using x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++, and the libzpaq::compress function took the number from the preset column as an argument
Charts for Leaderboards
Graph Notes
- The line joining the markers for different compressors on the scatter plot shows the Pareto frontier. That is, for each such compressor, no other analyzed programs in that category achieve better results for both the selected time and compression parameters.
- The names of submitted compressors appear in boldface.
- The names of submitted compressors that failed to fully comply with the competition rules appear in strikethrough.
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Participated Compressors
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To find out more about the competition, check out Rules and Conditions. Also see discussions at Encode.su forum for this competition.
Register for News and Test Data
Register to receive news and get access to the full test data set from the Global Data Compression Competition 2020.
About Organizer and Sponsor
The test method and result validity are the sole responsibility of the organizer ("we" in this text), the Graphics & Media Lab of the Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics Department at Moscow State University.
The Graphics & Media Lab has more than 15 years of experience comparing video codecs. These comparisons are well known throughout the compression community.
This competition is sponsored by Huawei.
The Graphics & Media Lab has more than 15 years of experience comparing video codecs. These comparisons are well known throughout the compression community.
This competition is sponsored by Huawei.
Contacts
Send us your questions to
globalcompetition@compression.ru
To find out more about the competition, check out Rules and Conditions. Also see discussions at Encode.su forum for this competition.
globalcompetition@compression.ru
To find out more about the competition, check out Rules and Conditions. Also see discussions at Encode.su forum for this competition.
