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Press Release For immediate release
Contact Iraj Sodagar, Peter Schelkens (pr@jpeg.org)
October 15, 2010, Guangzhou, China

JPEG announces JPEG Innovations Workshop on Feb. 23, 2011, Tokyo, Japan

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/SC29/WG 1) and of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG16), responsible for the popular JPEG, JPEG 2000 and more recently, the JPSearch and 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 11-15, 2010 in Guangzhou, China hosted by the Guangzhou National Engineering Laboratory for Video Technology Research and Industrialization Center and the Chinese National Body.

WG1 is organizing a JPEG Innovations workshop to be held in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, 23rd February 2011. The goal of this workshop is to explore standardization opportunities in new trends in digital photography. The workshop will allow its participants to find out about the latest JPEG specifications that could be potentially used for emerging digital photography applications. Moreover, industry experts have been invited to report trends in their products and applications and to identify needs for new digital imaging standards. JPEG Innovations workshop is open to public and is aimed to allow attendees to find out about visions and needs for next generation digital photography products and services, as well as plans by JPEG on timely establishment of international standards that will help accelerate adoption of new products and services by the market, benefiting industry and consumers. Solutions for extensions of existing JPEG formats allowing backward compatibility with legacy systems will be among important issues that will be addressed and discussed during the workshop. JPEG Innovations is chartered to increase awareness of JPEG family of standards, to identify, explore and investigate new image related standard topics, to engage with industry and academia to hold workshops and seminars on these areas  nd raise the momentum for starting new standardization work items. All interested parties are invited to collaborate with JPEG Innovations by contacting the chair, Dr. Touradj Ebrahimi at innovations@jpeg.org.

JPEG is pleased to announce that the approval process for Motion JPEG XR (ITU-T Rec. T.833 | ISO/IEC 29199-3) has now been completed in both ITU-T and ISO/IEC. Furthermore, both the JPEG XR conformance testing (ITU-T Rec. T.834 | ISO/IEC 29199-4) and reference software (ITU-T Rec. T.835 | ISO/IEC 29199-5) has been published by ITU-T and ISO/IEC. The conformance testing set and reference software are now available free of charge from both ITU-T and ISO/IEC.

The Digital Cinema subgroup is pleased to announce the completion of the approval process on the amendment for archive profiles in Motion JPEG 2000. The amendment on Guidelines for Digital Cinema Applications and the amendment for additional framerates on digital cinema and archive profiles will go now to its final ballot stage. These amendments will help in the development of movie picture systems and increase the functionality.

In direct response to input from the print industry, JPEG has launched the effort to create a new amendment to ISO/IEC 10918-5 (JPEG File Interchange Format) to specify a profile for the support of JPEG-1 (ISO/IEC 10918-1) images for print applications. Members of the Advanced Function Presentation Consortium (AFPC) have expressed to JPEG a need for such a profile to identify a minimum set of JPEG features and to document a list of associated assumptions for certain characteristics of the compressed image in order to establish a well-defined common basis for the interchange of JPEG images amongst its related products.

The final draft international standard (FDIS) of the JPSearch Data interchange format between image repositories (ISO/IEC 24800-5, JPSearch Part 5) was produced at this meeting. It enables transfer and interchange of large collection of images with accompanying metadata among image repositories. Also, the Distributed Multimedia Applications Group of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain is selected as the first registration authority of JPSearch at this meeting. This registration authority will provide the users of JPSearch Part 2 (ISO/IEC 24800-2) with a key service of ensuring interoperability among various forms of metadata with images by allowing registration and download of metadata schemas and translation rules.

The Visual Search group of MPEG (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11) and the JPSearch group had a joint meeting in Guangzhou were both groups expressed their intent to strengthen their collaboration and to exploit the legacy of both committees on search and data exchange formats for visual data.

The Advanced Image Coding and Evaluation Methodologies subgroup (ISO/IEC 29170 - AIC) continues its efforts in defining common guidelines for the evaluation of image coding technologies. The committee produced Working Draft v.3 of the Technical Report (TR), which includes recommendations on quality assessment, complexity and functionality evaluation and also application dependent methodologies such as for medical, security and camera sensors imaging. JPEG puts the attention on calls for coding and evaluation technologies, use cases, requirements, evaluation procedures and test material for three targeted applications: medical imaging, camera sensors imaging and security applications.

"JPEG is pleased to announce the JPEG Innovations Workshop will be held on Feb. 23, 2010, in Tokyo, Japan. JPEG welcomes industry experts to participate in the workshop," 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 (54th) will be held in Tokyo, Japan, hosted by the Japanese National Body, February 21 - 25, 2011.

More information about JPEG and its work is available at www.jpeg.org or by contacting Iraj Sodagar and Peter Schelkens, the JPEG PR ad hoc group at pr@jpeg.org.

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