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The JPEG 2000 Suite of Standards Progresses at Meeting

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 November 6-10, 2006, in Jeju, Republic of Korea, hosted by Korean Agency for Technology and Standards, with delegates from 9 countries.

JPEG 2000 Part 8: Secure JPEG 2000, also known as JPSEC, has passed the 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.

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

JPEG 2000 Part 9 also known as JPIP, 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. A final call for participants for interoperability testing has been issued and organizations implementing JPIP are encouraged to participate at the 41st WG1 Meeting in San Jose, California, April 23-27, 2007. For more information please contact jpip@jpeg.org.

JPEG 2000 Part 10 ad hoc group, also known as JP3D, has been working on the extension of JPEG 2000 to three-dimensional images such as Computer Tomography (CT) scans or scientific simulations. Their document, JPEG 2000 Part 10, has reached the Final 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.

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 is underway.

JPSearch (ISO/IEC 24800, Still Image Search) is a new project that aims to develop a standard framework for searching large collections of images. A draft Technical Report covering the Framework and System Components exists. The JPSearch ad hoc group has issued a call for implementations of still image search and retrieval systems and invites participation at the 41st WG1 Meeting in San Jose, California. Interested parties should contact convenor@jpeg.org. The ad hoc group initiated several new parts to the standard as follows:

• Part 2: Schema and ontology registration and identification

• Part 3: JPSearch query format

• Part 4: Metadata embedded in image data (JPEG-1 and JPEG-2000) file format

• Part 5: Data interchange format between image repositories

The work towards Advanced Image Coding (AIC), another new project, progressed with several contributions both in coding system evaluation methodologies and examples of compression technologies to help validate such methodologies. A preliminary call for AIC evaluation methodologies has been issued together with a document providing scope and requirements for AIC.

Several presentations were given at the meeting.

• Scalable coding using motion adapted wavelet transform, Toni Zgaljic, Marta Mrak, Naeem Ramzan, Ebroul Izquierdo, Queen Mary University of London, UK

• Performance evaluation of wavelet-based HD video coding, Nicola Adami, Livio Lima, Francesca Manerba, Riccardo Leonardi, Alberto Signoroni, University of Brescia, Italy

• Overview of Distributed Source Coding for image and video coding, Luis Torres (UPC), Fernando Pereira (IST), Touradj Ebrahimi (EPFL), Joern Ostermann (UH), Christine Guillemot (INRIA), Riccardo Leonardi (UNIBS)

• COST 292: Semantic Multimodal Analysis of Digital Media, Frédéric Dufaux (EPFL, Switzerland)

• K-Space: Knowledge Space of Semantic Inference for Automatic Annotation and Retrieval of Multimedia Content, Ivan Damnjanovic, QMUL, UK

"The suite of JPEG 2000 standards is maturing and moving into adoption in a variety of application areas, and we are excited about the new parts of JPSearch which address several important standardization issues in Image Search", 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, 41st WG1 Meeting will be held in San Jose, California, USA, hosted by the US National Body, April 23-27, 2007.

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