en Press Release For immediate release Contact Louis Sharpe (pr@jpeg.org) San Jose, Califormia, May 2, 2007

JPWL - JPEG 2000 Wireless published as International Standard

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 April 23-27, 2007, in San Jose California, hosted by US NCITS with delegates from 12 countries.

JPEG 2000 Part 11: Wireless, also known as JPWL, has 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 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. The DC ad hoc group in JPEG has collaborated in successfully completing interoperability testing among various industry encoder and decoder implementations. The ad hoc group will be issuing a Call for Applications for archiving of motion imagery. Involvement from organizations involved in this field is solicited.  On a related note, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Montreux Sounds SA have decided to join forces to create a unique and first of a kind high resolution digital archive of the Montreux Jazz Festivals. The EDCINE project in Europe is another effort. This is a large, 8 country, 16 partner, 10 million euro project regarding digital cinema. See edcine.org.

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 is awaiting publication of its amendment covering 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. Interoperability testing among several JPIP implementations began at this meeting with generally good results and some useful information was gathered.  Participation from additional organizations is solicited, since testing will continue over the internet between meetings. For more information please contact jpip@jpeg.org.  The Part-9 ad-hoc group also started an amendment to support the retrieval of 3D images over the internet.

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 passed balloting for Final Committee Draft level. At this meeting, worked on the Draft International Standard document. Future core experiments on extended approaches to context modeling are planned. 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 13 defines an entry level JPEG 2000 encoder with widespread applications, intended to be implemented on a license and royalty fee free basis. Following approval of the FCD, Part 13 has been issued for FDIS ballot in March 2007, with the ballot closing in June 2007.  A final call has been issued via National Bodies, requesting that patent holders reconfirm their Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) statements. 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..

JPSearch (ISO/IEC 24800, Still Image Search) is a 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 group has decided to focus on vertical companies offering image search across large collections such as stock photos, medical images for diagnosis, etc. Interested parties should contact convenor@jpeg.org.

The work towards Advanced Image Coding (AIC), progressed. A preliminary call for AIC evaluation methodologies has been issued together with a document providing scope and requirements for AIC. Several presentations were made to this group.

Several presentations were given at the meeting, either in plenary sessions or in the AIC sessions.

• HD Photo, from Microsoft.  Microsoft introduced their HD Photo (formerly Windows Media Format) proposals to the AIC group, and provided a  range of software and picture samples.  Information on this may be covered in a separate press release later. 
  
• Dr Guillaume Boisson of Thomson France presented 'Multi View', proposing a new work item on stereoscopic picture encoding 
  
• Dankook University presented a "weighted wavelet correlogram color descriptor" which it was suggested provided an effective method when compared to alternatives for multi-resolution image retrieval within the JPSearch framework
  
• Scalability evaluation criteria, Scott Houchin, Aerospace
  
• Effective color space representation for compression of HDR images with JPEG2000, Nicola Adami, University of Brescia

 A number of presentations were made concerning the EDcine project (www.edcine.org).  These included:

• An overview of EDcine from Siegfried Foessel, Fraunhofer IIS.  The project has 16 partners, and a budget of around 10 MEUR
• A packetization technique for multi-casting D-cinema content from Fabrizio Frescura at the University of Perugia
• A proposed HDTV / D-Cinema conversion framework from Didier Nicholson of Thales
• A real time encoder for JPEG 2000 from Joerg Mohr, Fraunhofer IIS "   

"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 eBay 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, 42nd WG1 Meeting will be held in Lausanne, Switzerland, hosted by the Swiss National Body, July 2 - 6, 2007.

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

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