Press Release - 35th Meeting, Lisbon

Press Release For immediate release
Contact Lou Sharpe, lou.sharpe@picturel.com
Lisbon, Portugal, March 14-18, 2005

JPEG 2000: Digital Cinema, Security, Hidden Text Work Progresses

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 Lisbon, Portugal, hosted by Adetti (Associação para o Desenvolvimento das Telecomunicações e Técnicas de Informática), with delegates from 11 countries.

Work progressed on a variety of technologies within the JPEG 2000 family of standards.

The JPSEC ad hoc group for Part 8 of the JPEG 2000 standard launched an effort to extend the JPSEC tools and techniques to the JPEG 2000 file format level. This allows the flexibility and extensibility provided by the JPSEC signaling syntax to be applied to the broader set of media objects encompassed by the file format standards. JPSEC intends to reach Final Draft International Standard status at the next international meeting in Geneva in July 2006 and plans to release a working draft of the JPSEC file format extension.

The JPSEC standard addresses security services for JPEG 2000 images and thus 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.

The Digital Cinema ad hoc group within the JPEG committee progressed the amendment to profiles of JPEG 2000 for digital cinema applications to its final proposed draft amendment (FPDAM) stage. The Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) organization 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) continued, putting forth a formal work plan to complete JPSearch Part 1, titled "System framework and components." This will be a technical report describing the architecture of the anticipated system and the components within that system. Part 1 is scheduled to be completed by July, 2006. Future JPSearch parts will standardize individual components of that framework. A second call for proposals has been put forth, referencing an outline of the anticipated framework. Submissions intended for review at the 36th WG1 in Geneva, Switzerland, are requested by 30 June, 2005.

The DICOM medical imaging standard is finalizing Supplement 105, dealing with the inclusion of Multi-component Transformations in Part 2 of JPEG 2000 as a new transfer syntax for the compression of volumetric medical imagery. In addition, Supplement 106 will be going out for public comment March 25th, 2005 to include JPIP as a protocol for remote browsing of medical images compressed using JPEG 2000.

The JPIP standard 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 is finalized as Part 9 of JPEG 2000 and interoperability testing is being defined. JPIP Ad Hoc Group is calling for interested parties to participate in interoperability testing and they are encouraged to contact JPEG at the contact points below if they can participate. Amendment 1 to JPIP has progressed to PDAM (proposed draft amendment) status.

The JPM standard is Part 6 of JPEG 2000, a file format for document images incorporating multiple layered compression formats. The JPM ad hoc group progressed Amendment 1 to PDAM (Proposed Draft Amendment) status at this meeting. This amendment incorporates an optional method for including hidden text xml data (HTX) in a JPM file.

"We are 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, JPEG and JBIG2:

A JPWL implementation in Open JPEG 2000 by Fabrizio Frescura (Italy)
A JPEG 2000 decoder architecture for Digital Cinema by Fabrizio Frescura (Italy)
Transmission of JPEG 2000 Codestream using Turbocodes by Ambarish Natu (Australia)
Digital Object Rights Management by Carlos Serrao (Portugal)
JPEG DCT Amendment motivation by Joan Mitchell (USA)
Update on DICOM medical imaging by Alexis Tzannes (USA)
A JBIG2 implementation in JPM (Part 6) by Klaus Jung (Germany)
Using metadata in PASCAL, a JPSEC application by Jean Barda (France)
PR technology report, latest news from PMA and CTIA by Jean Barda (France)

The JPEG web site (http://www.jpeg.org) has sponsorship opportunities for 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, 36th JPEG Meeting will be hosted by the ITU-T in Geneva, Switzerland, July 14 - 18, 2005.

More on the Lisbon JPEG session from:
Lou Sharpe (lou.sharpe@picturel.com)
Information on JPEG 2000 can also be found at www.jpeg.org.

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