JD DPG Image Compression Technology Reduces Image Size by 50% While Maintaining JPEG Compatibility

In large e‑commerce sites, images account for roughly 90% of traffic, prompting a focus on reducing image size without sacrificing visual experience. Google’s WebP has already reduced image size by about 25%, and JD adopted it in 2014, achieving similar CDN traffic reductions.

JD’s Infrastructure Department recently launched the DPG image compression technology, a lossy format compatible with JPEG and supported on all platforms and browsers. User tests with 10,000 images showed DPG’s visual clarity matches WebP, while cutting image size by 50% and halving CDN bandwidth usage.

JD stores over a hundred billion original images and processes requests in real time, requiring each image to be handled within 50 ms. Therefore, DPG compression must also be performed online.

The DPG algorithm leverages the observation that over 30% of pixels in JD’s images are background or white, borrowing techniques from HEIF to achieve a 63% traffic reduction. The technology has been fully rolled out internally.

Comparative tests on 100,000 JD images show DPG-compressed files are only 50% the size of WebP files, with no noticeable loss in visual quality on both PC and mobile devices. Original images (~306 KB) become ~120 KB after DPG compression, versus ~220 KB for WebP.

JD predicts that full‑business adoption of DPG will save over ten million yuan in CDN costs annually and reduce users’ mobile data consumption by about 50%.

To experience DPG, append the .dpg suffix to image URLs (or .webp for comparison) as demonstrated in the examples.