Soft Image Caching

Introduction

Current browser and proxy caches for the World Wide Web employ a hard strategy: an object is either stored in the cache, or it is not.
If images are stored in a progressive or embedded format the cache can use a soft strategy: for less popular images, only a part of the file will be cached. This will display with higher distortion than the full file, i.e. it is a lower quality (or resolution) preview. If the user needs better quality, only the remaining file part has to be requested from the server.

Advantages of Soft Caching

Better cache memory utilization
More images fit in cache
Faster image browsing due to "automatic preview"
User may trade off quality for speed

The Project

The Soft Cache project is joint work between the AudioVisual Communications Lab at EPFL and the Integrated Media Systems Center at USC. Currently, the following researchers are involved:

Of course there is a sister homepage on the other side of the big pond. Some simulation results are available there.

Publications

Antonio Ortega, Fabio Carignano, Serge Ayer and Martin Vetterli, ``Soft Caching: Web Cache Management for Images'', In IEEE Signal Processing Society Workshop on Multimedia, Princeton, NJ, June 1997
Claudio Weidmann, Martin Vetterli, Antonio Ortega and Fabio Carignano, ``Soft Caching: Image Caching in a Rate-Distortion Framework'', to appear in Proc. of ICIP'97, Santa Barbara, California, October 1997. [Abstract] [Postscript]