Yes, and this was all the rage in the late '80s and early '90s. Everyone was sure this will replace JPEGs. See http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~agupta/_projects/

Yes, and this was all the rage in the late '80s and early '90s. Everyone was sure this will replace JPEGs. See http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~agupta/_projects/image_processing/web/FractalImageCompression/ http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~agupta/_projects/image_proce... for a description. Spoiler: It didn't happen. Fractal compression mostly matched JPEG on rate/quality ; it didn't improve on it, though; and it was horrible in both memory use, run time, and memory requirements compared to JPEG. So JPEG it (still) is. Another Spoiler: If file size was the criterion, BPG would be replacing JPEG these days. That isn't happening either.