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Press Release For immediate release
Contact Louis Sharpe (pr@jpeg.org)
Xian, China, October 30, 2009

JPEG 2000 Alliance consortium group formed, JPEG XR Reference Software and JPSearch Part 3 ready for Final Draft 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 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 JPSearch, JPEG XR families of imaging standards. The WG1 group meets nominally three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. The latest meeting was held on October 26 - 30, 2009, at the Xian Sheraton Hotel, Xian, China, hosted by the Chinese National Body.

JPEG is pleased to see the announcement of the formation of an industry consortium group "JPEG2000 Alliance" at the IBC 2009 in September 2009. The consortium was founded to support the awareness of the benefits of JPEG2000 and to ensure the interoperability of JPEG2000 products. The alliance consists of technology leaders from industry and research organizations, including members of JPEG. The consortium is open for other partners. The website can be found under www.jpeg2000alliance.com.

The Digital Cinema (DC) ad hoc group has been successful in seeing its work adopted by the industry. At this meeting progress was made on Additional Frame Rates (AFR) for Digital Cinema and archive profiles. The proposed amendment enables the determination of the data size of the compressed bit stream from the predefined bit rate and allows a wider range of frame rates. Also produced at the meeting was Guidelines for Digital Cinema applications. The guidelines address multicast transmission, information about visual weighting and quantization factors for distribution, and implementation guidelines for archive systems. The broadcast application sub-group continued the work on new broadcast profiles, including joint work with MPEG to enable the transmission of JPEG2000 code streams in MPEG-2 Transport Streams.

In JPEG XR, JPEG is pleased to announce the completion of its work on developing reference software source code and a corrigendum testing set for JPEG XR image coding (ISO/IEC 29199-2 ITU-T Rec. T.832). These specifications are now ready for final approval (FDIS) ballot. The - 3 - reference software will greatly aid the technology community to develop implementations of the JPEG XR image coding standard, and the conformance test set will help ensure that implementations are correct and fully interoperable. These standards will be published as ISO/IEC 29199-4 (JPEG XR conformance) and ISO/IEC 29199-5 (JPEG XR reference software), and will also soon be published as corresponding ITU-T Recommendations.

The JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF) has been a popular file format for images encoded by the JPEG standard (ISO/IEC 10918-1 | ITU-T T.81). The new JPEG Part 5 (10918-5) that officially standardizes JFIF was promoted to Final Committee Draft (FCD) status at this meeting. This standard provides an opportunity to include new developments relating to image metadata such as JPSearch metadata into the JFIF file format. In JPSearch (ISO/IEC 24800, Still Image Search), the JPSearch Part 2 FCD and JPSearch Part 3 FDIS have been released. Part 2 FCD provides core metadata schema, registration and identification process of the schema, and rules to express mapping between proprietary metadata schema and core metadata schema. Part 3 FDIS is designed to ensure the interoperability among users of various different metadata specifications for their images. Furthermore, it provides standardized tools for querying metadata repositories and receiving results as well as querying capabilities of the service providers. The call for proposals for reference software for JPSearch Part 6 - Reference Software continues. Interested parties are welcome to submit proposals; these can be sent after regregistering at jpsearch-subscribe@jpeg.org

The JBIG committee continued its work on the colour amendment to JBIG2, and has promoted its work to PDAM ballot stage. This will allow images of office documents which contain only "spot" colour or the combination of any two colours to be more efficiently compressed than by the use of JPEG family standard.

The following presentations were made at plenary sessions of the meeting:

• The JPEG 2000 Alliance," by Dr. Siegfried Foessel, Germany.
• "Presentation on surveillance applications," by Dr. Siegfried Foessel, Germany.
• "JPEG 2000 Stereoscopic Image Compression for 3D Display," by Prof. Young S. Kim, and Mr. Eung Y. Song, Korea.
• "JNB proposal on enhanced lazy mode for JPEG2000 lossless coding and decoding," by Dr. Takahiro Fukuhara, Japan.

"We are excited to see the announcement of the JPEG 2000 Alliance consortium to promote adoption of JPEG 2000 standard in the industry, and we are glad to announce the completion of JPEG XR Reference Software," 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 WG 1 Meeting (51st) will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, hosted by the US National Body, March 15 - 19, 2010.

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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