How to use IFSAF

a tutorial

Check the Hardware/Software requirements, unpack the IFSAF ZIP file under the toplevel directory \IFS. Get a 256x256 truecolor image, in the Windows DIB RGB encoded format, not the RLE encoded.
Optionally you could prepare another 256x256 truecolor image, that will be used for the decoding.

Now follow these steps:

  1. start IFSAF from the \IFS directory - we suppose in the following that you have short menus, if you don't simply click on Option/Short Menu.
  2. File/Open and select the lena.bmp, press OK.
  3. Sometimes you should better to close the status window, since because of some bug the program may hang on completion of encoding, when updating the Status window.
  4. Click on the window showing the image.
  5. Select Image/Encode from menu.
  6. Look at the pop-up windows that will be displayed, while the encoding take place. The program defaults for a mix of high speed and good compression ratio, so the image quality at this stage may be very poor.
  7. Consider that the encoding is not recursive on color images since we have had some trouble with the procedure, we disabled this feature.
  8. On completion, a dialog box will show the name of the set of output files, (.RPT, .IFS, .STS), after clicking OK, the collage will show.
You can optionally save the collage with File/Save. Sorry, but you can not specify the name, a progressive number will be assigned in automatic. You can rename it, of course.
Now you can decompress the image, from the .IFS file, starting from an arbitrary other file (with same dimensions, anyway).
  1. Open such a file selecting File/Open or simply click on the original lena image window if you don't have it.
  2. Select Image/Decode From File... and select the .IFS file with the name showed in the dialog box at the end of the encoding. (most likely it will be ifs001.ifs).
  3. Look at the decoding pop-up window, it shows 10 images converging to the original image - well, an approximation of it -.
    The final image represents a good approximation of the fractal attractor for the iterated functions systems calculated for the image.
  4. Now you can optionally save the decompressed image selecting File/Save
  5. May be better to quit and restart the program before encoding some other image.

See Also:

  • Fractal Image Compression Software.
  • IFASF Overview.
  • How to use IFSAF - a tutorial.
  • Hardware/Software requirements for IFSAF.
  • The IFSAF underlying theory.
    Home PREVIOUSNEXT Tree (c) Mail Guestbook

    Giovambattista Pulcini

    Last Revised: April, 1997 - ver. 2.01