Apple announces image-compression AI codec “PICO,” reducing data size by up to two-thirds at the same image quality

Apple introduced PICO, a machine-learning image codec aimed at practical, perceptual compression on real devices.

The company says PICO can match the visual quality of AV1, AV2, VVC, ECM, and JPEG-AI while using up to one-third less data.

Apple also says PICO outperforms other learned codecs by 20% to 40% in bitrate reduction.

The research includes iPhone hardware speed tests plus training and evaluation details, but performance is weaker on simple synthetic images.