Contact Louis Sharpe (pr@jpeg.org)

Assisi, Perugia, Italy, July 14, 2006

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a working group of ISO/IEC, the International Organisation for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission, (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1) and of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG16), responsible for the popular JPEG and, more recently, the JPEG 2000 family of imaging standards. The WG1 group meets three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. The latest meeting was held July 10-14, 2006, in Assisi, Perugia, Italy, hosted by University of Perugia, Italy, with delegates from 11 countries.

At this meeting, it was announced that the JPEG 2000 Part 8: Secure JPEG 2000, also known as JPSEC standard, has passed balloting process and is now formally an ISO Standard (ISO/IEC 15444-8). 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 (DC) ad hoc group within the JPEG committee has been very active and successful in seeing their work adopted by the industry. The Digital Cinema Initiatives (www.dcimovies.com) organization has adopted JPEG 2000 for future distribution of digital movies to theatres.

The JP3D Ad hoc group, working on extension of JPEG 2000 to three-dimensional images such as Computer Tomography (CT) scans or scientific simulations is very active. Their document, JPEG 2000 Part 10, has reached the Committee Draft level at this meeting. The group is looking into network browsing JPIP support. The Vrije Universiteit Brussel-IBBT has produced verification model software and the University of Valladolid has produced reference software.

JPEG 2000 Part 11, Wireless, also known as JPWL, is about to become an International Standard. JPWL has standardised tools and methods to achieve the efficient transmission of JPEG 2000 imagery over an error-prone wireless system. The JPWL ad hoc group has released reference software at openjpeg.org and has created test bitstreams for compliance testing.

The JPEG 2000 Part 6, also known as JPM, concerns with the file format for document images incorporating multiple layered compression formats. The JPM ad hoc group continued work on a Hidden Text XML data (HTX) format to store OCR results in image files.

The JPIP standard, Part 9 of JPEG 2000, 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. Interoperability testing has begun and organizations implementing JPIP are encouraged to participate. For more information please contact jpip@jpeg.org. Work began on supporting browsing 3-dimensional JP3D images over a network.

JPEG 2000 Part 13 defines an entry level JPEG 2000 encoder with widespread applications. A call to National Bodies 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. Balloting on the Final Committee Draft will begin soon.

JPSearch (ISO 24800, Still Image Search) aims to develop a standard framework for searching large collections of images. A draft Technical Report is published at this meeting and a whitepaper is being developed which will show motivations for JPSearch and its relevance to industry.

Several presentations were given at the meeting.

1. Mutual Image-based Authentication Framework with JPEG2000 in Wireless Environment, Ms. Tatiana Onali, Univ. of Cagliary, Italy

2. Efficient wavelet based video compression, Dr. Riccardo Leonardi, University of Brescia, Italy

3. Reliable multicast protocol for D-Cinema distribution, Dr. Paolo Micanti, Univ. of Perugia, Italy

4. Human visual system in the framework of JPEG2000, Dr. Chaker Larabi, Univ. of Poitiers, France

5. Image Content Search, Dr. Nozha Boujemaa, INRIA, France

6. JBIG2 Color Amendment Proposal, Mr. Louis Sharpe, Picture Elements Inc, USA

"Digital Cinema continues to be a real success story, and will soon offer the general public a chance to see JPEG 2000 technology whenever they go to the movies. The JPSEC standard is also completed. Now people can begin to see the rich functionality that JPEG 2000 offers - as a scalable, secure system for networking images and not just another compression method offering smaller size and better quality," said Dr. Daniel Lee of Yahoo! Inc., Convener of the JPEG Group.

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, Richard Clark (webmaster@jpeg.org), for this high-traffic site.

The next, 40th WG1 Meeting will be held in Jeju, Korea, hosted by the Korean National Body, November 6-10, 2006.

More information at www.jpeg.org or by contacting Lou Sharpe, PR Chair at pr@jpeg.org.