Tiling (allowing parallel processing)

[nigeltao]

Context:
phoboslab/qoi#33

[juarezr]

@nigeltao ,

I was wondering about the possible benefits that a space-filling curve like Hildeberg Curve could bring against the row-column (left-right/top-bottom) approach of QOI:

• Exploit locality (pixels with the same color may be relatively close to each other in rows and also in columns)
• Make more straightforward partitioning on the power of 2 tiles. E.:
  • Center to corners
  • Corners to center
  • Rectangular, L-shaped, or T-shaped tiles
  • Multi-level tilling (follow the curve first on tiles of predefined size, then on pixels inside each tile)
• Enable multi-processing/parallelism on the encoder/decoder by exploiting the tilling by a pool of threads each one working on its specific tile.

[nigeltao]

Space-filling curves are issue #6.