Press Release       For immediate release
Contact Richard Clark (pr@jpeg.org) Singapore, November 14-18, 2005

JPEG 2000:
3D for Medical Imaging, Digital Movies 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 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 November 14-18, in Singapore, hosted by SingaporeInformation Technology Standards Committee and Institute for Infocomm Research, with delegates from 10 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. In a key development, the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI - www.dcimovies.com) organization has adopted JPEG 2000 for future distribution of digital movies to theatres (see their Press Release at http://www.dcimovies.com/press/07-27-05.tt2). The JPEG committee is working closely with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) to standardize aspects of this future architecture.  At the Singapore meeting, JPEG formally ratified Amendment 1 to ISO15444-1:2004 (the JPEG2000 standard) which handles the specific needs of digital cinema.  The JPEG2000 amendment features two profiles specifically targeted to Digital Cinema applications.  The profiles feature scalable support of high quality 2K and 4K motion imagery.  JPEG is pleased to announce the completion of the amendment, which can now be used for the development of equipment and further standards.

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.

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 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 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 JP3D Ad hoc group working on extension of JPEG 2000 to three-dimensional images such as Computer Tomography (CT) 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 to assist in defining basic and advanced profiles, especially from the medical imaging community. At the Singapore meeting (November 2005) Working Draft v5.2 of JP3D was released. In this draft all relevant marker segments have been defined. Currently, the JP3D group is probing for candidates willing to produce reference software. The Vrije Universiteit Brussel-IBBT has already announced that they will produce reference software based on the current working draft. In collaboration with Part 9 - JPIP the procedure for a new amendment covering JPIP support for JPEG2000 extensions (JP3D, JPWL, JPSEC) was launched.

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.  JPEG 2000 Part 11, Wireless - JPWL, has now reached the stage of Final Draft International Standard. JPWL has standardised tools and methods to achieve the efficient transmission of JPEG 2000 imagery over an error-prone wireless system. More specifically, JPWL extends the elements in the core coding system described in Part 1 with mechanisms for error protection and correction. These extensions can be used in bit error or packet loss contexts and they are backwards compatible  in the sense that decoders which implement Part 1 are able to skip the extensions defined in JPWL.

JPEG 2000 Part 13, defining a royalty and license fee free entry level JPEG 2000 encoder with widespread applications, is at Committee 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.

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.

Early work on JPSearch (ISO 24800, Still Image Search) continued. This effort aims to develop a standard framework for searching large collections of images by a variety of criteria.  The JPSearch specifications will provide a core set of technologies and address issues of image metadata so that individual implementers can create interoperable image search systems. Currently, JPSearch will be a multi-part standard. Part 1 will be a Technical Report with two purposes. The first is to provide the JPEG user community with a clear understanding of the entire image retrieval process. The second is to identify the components involved in such a search process, the linkages between them, and which of these components and links should be standardized in JPSearch. 

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.

"We are happy to see two of our standards, JPWL and JPSEC reach the Final Draft International Standard stage, respectively," said Dr. Daniel Lee of Yahoo! Inc., Convener of the JPEG Group, "JPWL provides powerful tools and methods to achieve efficient transmission of JPEG 2000 imagery over an error-prone wireless system. JPSEC offers exciting opportunities for secure global distribution and e-commerce for digital images."  We are particularly impressed by the work of the Open Geospatial Consortium, who have created an extensive document, which shows how extensive geographical metadata in the form of the new Geography Markup Language (GML) can be linked into JPEG 2000 coded images (www.opengeospatial.org).

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, Richard Clark (webmaster@jpeg.org) looks forward to enquiries from the marketing departments of interested companies involved in JPEG 2000 regarding sponsoring and advertising opportunities at this high-traffic site.  The web activities have recently been transferred to a new not for profit organization, JPEG Forum Ltd, so that all revenues will be dedicated to encouraging the activities and publicity of the JPEG committee.

The next, 38th JPEG Meeting will held in Cupertino, California, hosted by HP, March 13 - 17, 2006.
 
Information on JPEG 2000 can also be found at www.jpeg.org.