Facebook Spectrum

2019: Publication of source codes

In January, 2019 Facebook announced disclosure of source codes of library for image processing of Spectrum which the world's largest social network uses for improvement of quality of the photos loaded by users of applications of the company.

This system was initially applied by Facebook, and in November, 2018 she was let out in a public access within the beta (0.9). In January of the 2019th there was Spectrum 1.0.0, and its source codes were published on the GitHub portal. Thus, the technology became available to huge community of developers.^[1]

Facebook opened source codes of the system allowing to load quickly big photos without loss of quality

According to the VentureBeat edition, cameras in modern smartphones began to take the central place. Their performance increases due to artificial intelligence and additional sensors by joy of fans of photos. However high quality of pictures leads to increase in their sizes that complicates their exchange between users and consumes a lot of traffic.

Applications, like WhatsApp and Facebook, squeeze images (reduce the size and reformat pictures) to accelerate their loading in social network. But it affects quality.

The Spectrum library helps to solve this problem, using technology of code conversion of the image on the user device. As a result even big photos on iPhone and Android gadgets are loaded quickly without loss of quality.

The technology is integrated with libraries of image compression from third-party producers, including MozJpeg from Mozilla. MozJpeg can reduce file size by 10-15% by preparation for loading.

Facebook claims that Spectrum copes with image processing more effectively, than API interfaces which are built in other software platforms as different mobile OS and the developed API can issue unequal results.^[2]

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