en

Press Release For immediate release
Contact Louis Sharpe (pr@jpeg.org)
San Francisco, USA, April 4, 2008

JPEG 2000 Usage Grows in Digital Cinema, JPSearch and JPEG XR Made Advances

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, JPEG 2000 and more recently, the JPEG XR families of imaging standards. The WG1 group meets three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. The latest meeting was held March 30 - April 4, 2008, in San Francisco, California, USA, hosted by the US National Body with over 70 experts from 14 countries.

The Digital Cinema (DC) ad hoc group within the JPEG committee has been very 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, including 3D movies. The International Federation of Film Archive (FIAF) is considering JPEG 2000 as future standard for movie archives. An effort was initiated to develop specifications for broadcast backhaul applications, covering the post-production and taped-delayed needs of the broadcast industry. An email reflector is set up at broadcast-subscribe@jpeg.org.

JPSearch (ISO/IEC 24800, Still Image Search) made good progress.

• Part 1, The Technical Report, ISO/IEC 24800-1 covering the Framework and System Components has been officially published.
• Part 2, which is focused on schema and ontology registration and identifications, produced a preliminary Working Draft.
• Part 3, which standardizes JPSearch query format, works closely with MPEG query format.
• Part 4, which standardizes on metadata embedded in image data file formats (JPEG and JPEG 2000) approved a Working Draft
• Part 5, which standardizes the data interchange format between image repositories, approved a Working Draft.

JPEG XR is a new project, based on work contributed by Microsoft from HD Photo, that aims to bring JPEG-standardized high dynamic range imaging and compression to a new generation of digital cameras. The JPEG XR ad hoc group worked on response to national body comments on the Committee Draft (CD) ballot of the JPEG XR specification document and plans toward progressing it to Final Committee Draft (FCD) status expected to go for ballot at the end of the 45th WG1 Poitier Meeting, in July, have been worked out. The latest copy of the CD will be made available shortly from the JPEG website (www.jpeg.org).

A draft version of a JPEG XR reference software encoder/decoder was distributed to the committee as a candidate for Part 3 of JPEG XR. This was developed directly from the specification as a "clean room" implementation. The work on a compliance specification destined to become Part 4 of JPEG XR has also begun.

JPEG 2000 Part 9, 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 and compliance tests among JPIP implementations from Aware, Pegasus, Ricoh, and ITT were successful at the meeting.

JPEG 2000 Part 10 ah hoc group, known as JP3D, has been working on the extension of JPEG 2000 to 3D images such as Computer Tomography (CT) scans or scientific simulations. The document, JPEG 2000 Part 10, has reached International Standard (IS) level. At this meeting, the ad hoc group initiated request for input on floating point applications.

JPEG 2000 Part 11: Wireless, known as JPWL, has reached International Standard status. JPWL standardizes tools and methods to achieve the efficient transmission of JPEG 2000 images 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 following presentations were made at plenary sessions:

• "Hardware characteristics comparison: JPEG XR, JPEG and JPEG2000," by Gen Sasaki, MegaChips Corp., Japan
• "JPEG XR Reference Software Overview," by Steve Williams, Picture Elements Inc, USA
• "HD Photo evaluation from a remote sensing systems perspective," by Scott Houchin, The Aerospace Corporation, USA
• "Proposal for objective distortion metrics for AIC standardization," by Dr. Jae-Jeong Hwang Kunsan University, Korea
• "Presentation on JPEG Historical Archive," by Richard Clark, Elysium, UK

"We are excited about the rapid progress of the standardization of JPEG XR. The suite of JPEG 2000 standards is maturing and moving into adoption in a variety of application areas, and we are excited about 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, 45th, WG1 Meeting will be held in Poitiers, France, hosted by the French National Body, July 7 - July 11, 2008.
More information at www.jpeg.org or by contacting Lou Sharpe, PR Chair at pr@jpeg.org.