Press Release, 36th Meeting

Press Release
For immediate release
Contact Lou Sharpe (pr@jpeg.org or lou.sharpe@picturel.com)

Geneva, Switzerland, July 18-22, 2005

JPEG 2000: 3D for Medical Imaging, Digital Movie Distribution, Library Use All on the Rise

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 July 18 -22, 2005, in Geneva, Switzerland, hosted by International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and the Swiss National Body, with delegates from 12 countries.

Work progressed on a variety of technologies within the JPEG 2000 family of standards. Taken together, these building blocks make up a next generation platform for network-enabled imaging, with the JP2 file destined to become the general imaging format of choice.

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 draft amendment (FDAM) stage. Compliance testing work has begun. 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.

The JP3D Ad hoc group working on extension of JPEG 2000 to three-dimensional images such as CAT scans or scientific simulations stepped up its activities at the meeting. Their document, Part 10 of JPEG 2000, is at the Working Draft level and the group is looking for input with respect to basic and advanced profiles especially from the medical imaging community.

The library and archive community continues to increase its interest in and support for JPEG 2000. The IS&T Archiving Conference in Washington in April, 2005 had several sessions on JPEG 2000 and many discussions about it. At the American Libraries Association (ALA) meeting in Chicago in June, a session on JPEG 2000 drew over a hundred people.

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 and a new compliance effort. JPSEC intends to reach Final Draft International Standard status at the Singapore meeting in November 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.

Early work on JPSearch (Still Image Search) continued. This effort aims to develop a standard framework for searching large collections of images by a variety of criteria.

The DICOM medical imaging standard has finalized 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 (three-dimensional) medical imagery. Supplement 106 is out for public comment. This includes 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. The JPIP Ad hoc group continues to call for interested parties to participate in interoperability testing of implementations of JPIP clients and servers.

The JPWL standard supports wireless applications of JPEG 2000. The JPWL ad hoc group has begun work on reference software and on compliance testing issues.

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 continued work on Amendment 1 to incorporate a method for including Hidden Text XML data (HTX) to store OCR results in a JPM file.

Part 13 of JPEG 2000, defining a royalty and license fee free entry level JPEG 2000 encoder with widespread applications, is at Working Draft stage. A call to WG1 members and others to reconfirm their Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) statements has been issued. The JPEG committee has always taken the view that open, license-fee free and royalty-fee free standards are the key to success in the marketplace and proved this principle with the original JPEG baseline standard.

"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, "JPIP, the protocol for network imaging, has the power to make images instantly usable anywhere on the network. JPSEC, the image security standard offers exciting opportunities for secure global distribution and e-commerce for digital images."

Daniel Lee published a paper entitled "JPEG 2000: Retrospective and New Developments" in the Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 93, No. 1, Jan. 2005, pp 32-41.

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, 37^thJPEG Meeting will be hosted in Singapore by the Information Technology Standards Committee and Institute for Infocomm Research, November 14 - 18, 2005.