Radware (News - Alert), a global leader of application delivery and application security solutions, commissioned NeuroStrata for a research study to support and augment development of a new image format and determine how rendering can affect user experience. The proprietary format, called PerfectImage (PI), is a lossy image carefully degraded using a DCIM (Digital Camera Images) human vision algorithm. The resulting file size is substantially reduced with only a 5 percent loss in quality.

For the study, 250 participants were asked to divulge their attitudes and expectations about online images before completing various online tasks based on visual and textual cues. Emotional responses to three different image renderings – standard lossless, PI, and Progressive JPEG – were captured and ran through facial analysis software. Lossless files are somewhat large in size but do not sacrifice any amount of quality; Progressive JPEGS display a low-quality placeholder image that loads quickly before rendering the full one, which is said to improve perceived speed but is more taxing on CPU.

Results of the data – available as an infographic – found that the PI format provided the highest level of overall happiness for respondents. The standard lossless format took much longer to load, whereas the Progressive JPEG format tended to frustrate users with its two-stage loading method that makes the brain work slightly harder in order to process it.

Following the test portion was a survey regarding attitudes and expectations about online images. The importance of developing a new format was emphasized when the results found that an overwhelming 95 percent of websites do not provide the highest level of satisfaction. 65 percent0 of respondents report being frustrated by images that take too long to load while 51.4 percent wait for most or all of the images on a page to load before interacting with it. However, only 50 percent of respondents felt their online browsing experience is affected significantly by image load times.

Image optimization has been a tough issue for as long as Internet browsers have been around. When bandwidth improved drastically over the dial-up connections of the past it seemed as though image loading would no longer be a problem, but the popularity of mobile devices, which again have limited bandwidth has made image optimization once again a priority for developers. A new rendering algorithm, such as the one being researched at Radware, can hopefully solve the problem permanently and make image loading a thing of the past.