Advances in Visual Data Compression and Communication

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Chapter 12

Compression for Cloud Photo Storage

12.1 Introduction

During the last decade, there was an explosive growth of images and photos on the

Web. Facebook announced in October 2012 that they have hosted 220 billion pho-

tos, and further, the amount was increasing at several hundred million every day [1].

Chinese Tencent announced in August 2012 that they have hosted over 150 billion

photos [275]. Microsoft also announced in October 2012 that its cloud storage Sky-

Drive has hosted 11 billion photos [276]. Let us assume the size of every photo is

2.5 MB on the average, 200 billion photos needs 500,000 1T hard disks to store. For

data safety, multiple copies (e.g., three copies) of every photo are needed and hard

disks have to be replaced ...