en

Press Release
For immediate release
Contact Louis Sharpe (pr@jpeg.org)
Poitiers, France, July 11, 2008

JPEG XR reaches Final Committee Draft phase of standardization

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a Working Group of ISO/IEC, the International Organisation for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission, (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1) and of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG16), responsible for the popular JPEG, JPEG 2000 and more recently, the JPEG XR families of image coding standards. The WG 1 group meets three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia.
The latest meeting was held July 7 - July 11, 2008, in Poitiers, France, hosted by the French National Body with over 50 experts from 11 countries.

JPEG XR (ISO/IEC 29199-2, JPEG XR Image Coding Specification), a new project based on Microsoft's HD Photo proposal, reached the Final committee Draft (FCD) balloting phase at this meeting. The associated Conformance and Reference Software for JPEG XR were also elevated to Committee Draft (CD) status. Arrangements for open access to the FCD and reference software will be provided by the committee in the near future.
Additionally, several new proposals were initiated at the meeting. They include a Motion JPEG XR format, a JPEG XR camera raw image coding capability and a Box-based File Format that will enable interoperability between JPEG XR and components of the JPEG 2000 family of imaging systems standards such as JPIP (JPEG 2000 Interactivity tools, APIs and protocols) and JPSEC (Secure JPEG 2000).

The Digital Cinema (DC) ad hoc group within the JPEG committee has been very successful in seeing its work adopted by the industry. The group has continued work on archive profiles for Digital Cinema movies. These profiles will allow both long-term storage of content using lossless compression and fast scalable access to archives with lossy compression. At this meeting, a new ad hoc group, the Broadcast Applications ad hoc group, was established based on requests from several industry partners, with support of organizations like the EBU. The main goal in this new area of work is to standardize profiles and develop guidelines for the use of JPEG 2000 in broadcast production systems. Comments and requirements are welcome and can be sent to WG 1 after registering at broadcast-subscribe@jpeg.org.

JPSearch (ISO/IEC 24800, Still Image Search) activity made significant progress at this meeting.
Part 2 of the standard, addressing the registration and identification of schema and ontology for image search metadata, became a Working Draft.
Part 3, defining the JPSearch query format which is closely related to the MPEG query format, was promoted to Committee Draft.
Part 4 on metadata embedded in image data (JPEG and JPEG 2000) file formats was approved and promoted to Committee Draft status.
Finally, Part 5, which concentrates on the data interchange format between image repositories produced a revision of a previously issued Working Draft.
In addition, contributions from European Research Consortia COST 292 and COST IC0604 brought further support to this standard by offering an openly accessible database of annotated images, as well as support for medical imaging requirements and technologies in JPSearch development.

The Advanced Image Coding (AIC) ad hoc group in charge of explorations of future image compression standard made a significant step forward by issuing a request to ISO/IEC for creation of a new work item to standardize the next generation of JPEG image compression called AIC. This standard will offer both evaluation methodologies for assessment of image compression systems, and specifications for a future generation of image compression system.
To this end, JPEG committee also issued a call for proposal for evaluation methodologies, and compression technologies and looks forward to submissions in these areas from interested parties.

The following presentations were made at plenary sessions:

• "Development of JPEG2000 HDTV Program Production System," by Dr.Tetsuro Kuge, NHK Engineering Services, Inc., Japan.
• "Accelerating a JPEG2000 coder with CUDA," by Dr. Alexander Schmitt, Fraunhofer IIS Germany. 
• "Proposal of JPEG XR Camera Raw Image Support," by Gen Sasaki, MegaChips Corporation, Japan. 
• "Objective and Subjective Assessment of Still Images," by Dr. Patrick Le Callet, Université de Nantes, France.o
• "COST IC0604 - EURO-TELEPATH - Telepathology Network in Europe," by Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi, on behalf of COST IC0604, EPFL, Switzerland. 
• "Image and Metadata Database for the JPSEARCH Activities," by Sam Minnelli, on behalf of COST 292, Alinari 24 ORE, Italy.

"JPEG XR brings new innovations to the digital camera marketplace through standardization as part of the JPEG family of imaging standards. In particular, we are excited that the JPEG XR has reached the Final Committee Draft stage in the standardization process," said Dr. Daniel Lee of eBay Inc., Convener of the JPEG committee.

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 (46th) WG 1 Meeting will be held in Busan, Republic of Korea, hosted by the Korean National Body, October 13 - 17, 2008.
More information about JPEG and its work is available at www.jpeg.org or by contacting Lou Sharpe, the JPEG PR Chair at pr@jpeg.org.
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