I immediately thought of a use-case for (a modified version of) this: raw compression in cameras.
Currently Sony has two options. Uncompressed raw that is huge, or lossy compressed raw that is half the size. They probably chose those options because throughput when shooting quickly matters a lot, so something like PNG would slow down shooting too much.
I imagine a blazingly fast halfway decent compression algorithm would be great. It might even speedup shooting by needing to write fewer bytes. But in general people taking star pictures will love having compression without it being lossy.
For reference an uncompressed raw file for 44MP is about 90MB. That starts filling up drive space rather fast.
I don't think this method fits camera raws particularly well. The real world is noisy, so it becomes very unlikely that you would ever hit the two most compressible methods of QOI, (1) pixel value repeat or (2) index into one of the previous 64 pixels. QOI works really well for 8-bit screenshots, with lots of pixel-values repetitions. No such luck in noisy 14-bit real-world images.
Also, this format was designed to be as simple as possible, and is byte-aligned, only handles 8-bit RGBA. You would need a different design for 12/14-bit RGB or RGBG (Bayer).
Currently Sony has two options. Uncompressed raw that is huge, or lossy compressed raw that is half the size. They probably chose those options because throughput when shooting quickly matters a lot, so something like PNG would slow down shooting too much.
I imagine a blazingly fast halfway decent compression algorithm would be great. It might even speedup shooting by needing to write fewer bytes. But in general people taking star pictures will love having compression without it being lossy.
For reference an uncompressed raw file for 44MP is about 90MB. That starts filling up drive space rather fast.