NEWS & PRESS
64th Meeting - San Jose, CA, USA - January 17, 2014

JPEG Progresses Work on High Dynamic Range Imaging

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a Working Group of ISO/IEC, the International Organisation for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission, (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1) and of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG16), responsible for the popular JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR and more recently, the JPSearch and JPEG XT families of imaging standards. The WG1 group meets nominally three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. The latest meeting was held on October 28 – 31, 2013 in Geneva, Switzerland.

To celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the JPEG standard, EPFL, Art&Media Communications and Studio Colloseo produced a video, “Birth of JPEG” that describes the history of the JPEG standard and its successors. The video can be downloaded from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P1kBLhDMpM.

On its San Jose Meeting, WG1 compiled the CD text for JPEG XT Part 2 (18477-2), one part of a series of extensions being designed for the popular JPEG standard designed more than twenty years ago. This specific extension provides compression of radiance data, for example obtained from HDR photography applications, while staying backwards compatible to legacy JPEG decoders. Additional extensions of JPEG for lossless and higher bit-depths integer sample representations are currently designed and will become available in the near future.

WG1 is pleased to announce the availability of amendment 6 of its JPEG 2000 standard, ISO/IEC 15444-1. This amendment clarifies the usage of ICC profiles and color space conversions for image data that exceed a sample precision of eight bits per component. While the JPEG 2000 code stream could represent such data from its first release on, the specifications for color space conversions were not sufficiently descriptive for higher bit depths.

JPEG is investigating an architectural framework to support Augmented Reality (AR) systems and to enable interoperability between AR systems and/or their composing blocks. More particularly, JPEG will investigate how JPEG’s coding standards, file formats and the JPSearch framework can be extended and deployed in order to facilitate AR applications. The JPEG committee will also be closely interacting with the MPEG committee (WG11), which is spending continued efforts on its Augmented Reality Application Format (ARAF) specification (MPEG-A).

A new evaluation procedure for assessing visually lossless coding is being specified in AIC part 2. This is a subjective test method intended for examining and testing coding systems for end display streaming and many applications where no loss of visual fidelity is important. The evaluation procedure is designed to evaluate still image coding systems with operating points optimized for visually lossless performance. In particular, this procedure can detect subtle defects and quantify the coding system quality with statistically repeatable JND scoring.

The JPEG web site (http://www.jpeg.org) has sponsorship opportunities for all companies involved in developments around JPEG. The marketing departments of interested companies should contact the webmaster for this high-traffic site.

The next (65th) WG 1 Meeting and its ad hoc group meetings will be held on March 31 – April 4, 2014, in Valencia, Spain.