Contact Lou Sharpe, lou.sharpe@picturel.com

Noosaville, Queensland, Australia, November 11, 2004

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a working group of ISO, the International Organisation for Standardization, (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1), responsible for the popular JPEG Imaging Standard and, more recently, the JPEG 2000 family of imaging standards. This group meets three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. The latest meeting was held last week in Noosaville, Queensland, Australia, hosted by Standards Australia, with delegates from 11 countries.  Work progressed on a variety of topics within the JPEG 2000 family of standards.

The JPSEC (JPEG 2000 Part 8) standard addressing security services for JPEG 2000 images progressed to Final Committee Draft (FCD) status. This is the first standard that jointly addresses security and media compression in a single specification. This combination allows protected images to retain all the JPEG 2000 system features such as scalability, JPIP network browsing, simple transcodability and progression to lossless. JPSEC offers exciting opportunities for secure global distribution and e-commerce for digital images, allowing storage of partially or fully encrypted content, while still retaining the ability to adaptively deliver content for a wide variety of devices with varying display capabilities.

Motion JPEG 2000 activities were progressed. The Digital Cinema ad hoc group has created a proposed draft amendment for profiles for digital cinema applications. Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) has adopted JPEG 2000 for future distribution of digital movies to theatres. The JPEG committee is working closely with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) to standardize aspects of this future architecture.

Early work on JPSearch (Still Image Search) began. This new work item deals with standardization of metadata and technologies associated with searching still image libraries and databases on the Internet and in document management applications. An interim meeting in Hong Kong is planned for January 17-21, 2005, co-located with the WG11 meeting there. A call for proposals is anticipated in March 2005.

JPEG 2000 Three Dimensional (Part 10, "JP3D") has progressed. The main application fields of JP3D are volumetric imagery (medical computed images, industrial tomography, biological imagery) and remote sensing imagery (multi- and hyperspectral imagery; geophysical/astrophysical measurements). Working Draft 5.0 has been released and at the next meeting JP3D will move toward creation of Committee Draft 1.0. JP3D is actively looking for additional interested participants, especially those who are prepared to contribute to the reference software.

On a related, note, the DICOM medical imaging standard is in the process of including the Multi-component Transformations in Part 2 of JPEG 2000 as a new transfer syntax for the compression of volumetric medical imagery.

The JPIP standard (JPEG 2000 Part 9) allows powerful and efficient network access to JPEG 2000 images and their metadata in a way that exploits the best features of the JPEG 2000 standard. The standard has passed balloting and is moving toward publication as an International Standard. The JPIP Ad Hoc Group is calling for interested parties to participate in interoperability testing either at the March Lisbon meeting or over the Internet.

A demonstration of the browsing of JPEG 2000 images of large historical maps via a web page and plug in using JPIP at the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records of the National Archives of Japan was given by Hiroshi Osawa of Jugemu Company, Ltd. On November 4th and 5th, 2004, the University of Connecticut hosted The Symposium on the Adoption of JPEG 2000 in Archives and Libraries. The event included a JPEG 2000 Tutorial, vendor demonstrations and roundtable discussions focusing on accelerating the adoption of JPEG 2000 in the Archives and Libraries market

"We have reached an important milestone in reaching the FCD status for JPSEC. For the first time, we have a standard that offers exciting opportunities for secure global distribution and e-commerce for digital images. We are also happy with the way JPEG 2000 is getting adopted by various standards groups and organizations.", said Dr. Daniel Lee of Yahoo! Inc., Convener of the JPEG Group.

The following presentations were made at the plenary sessions on the latest developments in JPEG 2000 :

1. - A Primer for Digital Cinema by Walt Husak (USA) from Dolby Labs and SMPTE

2. - Operational Aspects of JPEG 2000 for Digital Cinema by Walt Husak (USA) from Dolby Labs and SMPTE

3. - JPIP Usage in National Archives of Japan by Hiroshi Osawa (Japan) from Jugemu Company, Ltd.

4. - Image Based Authentication for Mobile Devices by Prof. Daniel Giusto (Italy) from University of Cagliari

5. - WorldScreen Digital Cinema Project by Dr. Siegfried Foessel (Germany) from Fraunhofer IIS

The report on the JPEG web site (http://www.jpeg.org) showed high activity figures, the site is now open for sponsoring to all companies involved in developments around JPEG. The webmaster welcomes inquiries from the marketing departments of interested companies involved in JPEG 2000 regarding sponsoring and advertising opportunities at this high-traffic site.

The next, 35th JPEG Meeting will be hosted by the Portuguese National Body in Lisbon, Portugal, from March 14 to 18 2005