Spectral JPEG XL utilizes a technique used with human-visible images, a math trick called a discrete cosine transform (DCT), to make these massive files smaller […] it then applies a weighting step, dividing higher-frequency spectral coefficients by the overall brightness (the DC component), allowing less important data to be compressed more aggressively.
This all sounds like standard jpeg compression. Is it just jpeg with extra channels?
Yeah, it compresses better too though, and jpeg XL can be configured to compress lossless, which I imagine would also work here
Lossless JPEG would be amazing.
There is Lossless JPEG since 1993.
JPEG 2000 supports lossless mode.
It’s not just like jpeg with extra channels. It’s technically far superior, supports loss less compression, and the way the decompression works would make thumbnails obsolete. It can even recompress already existing JPEGs even smaller without additional generation loss. It’s hard to describe what a major step this format would be without getting very technical. A lot of operating systems and software already support it, but the Google chrome team is practically preventing widespread adoption because of company politics.