libvips

libvips is an image processing meta-library, whose development the European Commission funded back in the 1990s. Applications can outsource the heavy lifting of handling a variety of image types to this library. The library has meanwhile grown very popular with web developers around the world; the node binding, for example, is downloaded more than 5 million times a week at the time of writing.

In addition to scrutinizing the security of the library, this project will implement two key improvements to libvips: animated PNG support, and enhanced JXL support. The former capability (the addition of animated PNG support) can be gained from another NGI Zero project, libspng. libvips uses libspng for PNG read and write, so by extending libvips to use these new libspng features, they will become available to a large developer community very quickly.

Second, libvips has had preliminary support for the JXL format since libjxl v0.4. Since then, the libjxl API has evolved considerably and the libvips connector needs updating, especially in the areas of large image support and HDR, both increasingly important with the steady improvement of smartphone cameras.