A team from ITMO University worked from autumn 2010 to spring 2011 to improve lossless compression of JPEG files. They developed an encoder and decoder that uses techniques like arithmetic coding to encode DC values, runs of zeros, and AC coefficients in a way that maintains bit-level identical compression and decompression. They tested their algorithm on several images and saw file size reductions of up to 30% compared to the original JPEG files. Maintaining full bit-level compatibility with the JPEG standard presented some challenges around parsing file structures versus a stream-based approach.