Press Release
For immediate release
Contact Louis Sharpe (pr@jpeg.org)
Busan, Korea, October 17, 2008

JPEG 2000 Entry Level Encoder Standard Officially Published

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 WG1 group meets nominally three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. The latest meeting was held October 13 - 17, 2008, in Busan, Republic of Korea, hosted by the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS), the Korean National Body of ISO and IEC. French Over 40 experts from 12 countries attended the meeting.

At the meeting, it was announced that JPEG 2000 Part 13 (ISO/IEC 15444-13:2008), "JPEG 2000 image coding system: An entry level JPEG 2000 encoder" has been published by ISO/IEC. This standard defines an entry level JPEG 2000 encoder providing one or more optional complete encoding paths that use various features defined in the JPEG 2000 standards. The encoder can be used in various applications, based on patent for which royalty and license fee free declarations are available. The Editor of the standard, Mr. Yasuyuki Nomizu, received an Award of Developing Excellent International Standard from Japanese National Body for his contribution to this standard.

In JPEG XR (ISO/IEC 29199), the committee worked on extensions to the JPEG XR coding specification and on a technical report on system architecture to assist assimilation of the technology by industry. Working Drafts on the Motion JPEG XR and Boxed File Formats proposals were discussed and further progress was made on a JPEG XR based RAW image compression design. A special meeting will be held on February 2009 in Japan, where camera manufacturer representatives will be invited to provide input on the RAW image coding proposal. An ad hoc group was formed to prepare information about IPR claims related to the JPEG XR Part 2. The JPEG XR image coding specification is currently in the Final Committee Draft balloting phase, while the reference software and conformance plan are in the committee draft balloting phase.

The Digital Cinema (DC) ad hoc group has been very successful in seeing its work adopted by the industry which is continuing the deployment of Digital Cinema systems. Several studios have signed Virtual Print Fee (VPF) agreements with system integrators paving the way for more Digital Cinema installations. Progress was made on the archive profiles for digital cinema movies and broadcast applications Further investigations on extended bitrates and on visual weighting factors are in progress and will be reported at the next JPEG meeting. The broadcast application group has prepared a Working Draft for a new broadcast profiles. Comments and requirements are welcome and can be sent to JPEG Committee after registering at broadcast-subscribe@jpeg.org.

In JPSearch (ISO/IEC 24800, Still Image Search), work has started on solutions for Social Tagging as part of the JPSearch metadata support. When the Social Tagging is supported, people can add their own metadata such as key words or text description to existing images and share them with the associated metadata. The candidate technologies for Social Tagging which are published as a Working Draft of JPSearch Part 2, and will be further enhanced at the next JPEG meeting in San Francisco.

At the meeting, it was announced that the new work item called Advance Image Coding and Evaluation Methodologies (AIC) was approved by ISO/IEC. 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, a call for proposal for evaluation methodologies and compression technologies has been issued, and the committee looks forward to submissions in these areas from interested parties to be addressed at the next JPEG meeting in San Francisco. The following presentations were made at plenary sessions:

• "Metadata Ontology Proposal for JPSearch," by Dr. Jaime Delgado, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
• "A Flexible Hardware Solution for D-Cinema and HDTV Processing," by Dr. Fabrizio Frescura, Digilab2000 / Università degli Studi di Perugia.
• "Proposal for Camera Raw Image Pre-Processing Evaluation for JPEG XR AHG," by Mr. Yusuke Mizuno, MegaChips Corporation, Japan.

"We are glad to see that a JPEG 2000 entry level encoder, has been officially published by ISO and IEC as JPEG 2000 Part 13. We have a standard that an entry-level encoder can be used in various applications with guidelines on its use, based on patents for which royalty and license fee free declarations are available," 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 (47th) WG 1 Meeting will be held in San Francisco, California, USA, hosted by the US National Body, January 19 - 23, 2009.

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.