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Press Release For immediate release

Contact Iraj Sodagar, Peter Schelkens (pr@jpeg.org)
February 25, 2011, Tokyo, Japan

JPEG Innovations Workshop Highlights on 3D and HDR Markets

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 February 21-25, 2011 in Tokyo, Japan hosted by the Information Processing Society of Japan/Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan (IPSJ/ITSCJ) and the Japanese National Body.

Over a trillion pictures have been created in JPEG format while millions of images are shared every day among friends and family in e-mails, photo-hosting websites and the enormously popular social networking sites, like Facebook and Flickr. Digital photos are also widely printed at homes or through commercial printing services. The nature of digital photography is though changing. In addition to increasing resolution, the dynamic range of sensors in digital cameras has been increasing enabling more vivid, higher contrast and life-like color images. More recently, 3D cameras allow for creation of stereo imagery. New standards may be required to accelerate adoption
of such products and services by the market, as it was the case with the original JPEG standard. Hence, the JPEG Innovations workshop was organized to explore such opportunities in new trends in digital photography, by allowing the participants to find out about the latest JPEG specifications that could be potentially used for these emerging applications and by inviting industry experts to report trends in their products and applications and to identify needs for new digital imaging standards.

The workshop, attended by 75 participants representing key industrial and academic stakeholders, was chaired by Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi (EPFL) and had eminent speakers from different organizations and companies, namely Prof. Hiroshi Yasuda (Tokyo DENKI University), Mr. Mikio Watanabe (Fuji Film), Dr. Simon Sungho Cho (MasterImages), Mr. Walt Husak (Dolby Labs), and Mr. Ajit Ninan (Dolby Labs). The presentations focused on future technologies and applications for SC29/WG1, 3D visualization and broadcasting and HDR applications and were followed by a panel discussion led by Dr. Daniel T. Lee (SC29/WG1 Convener) and panel members: Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi, Dr. Simon Sungho Cho, Mr. Walt Husak, Mr. Ajit Ninan, and Prof. David Taubman (UNSW). 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 and 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.

In extend to this workshop JPEG is inviting industry and academia to share information with respect to requirements and/or technologies that are in support of the high-dynamic range and 3D/Stereoscopic imaging ecosystems and more specifically on the representation of this content. JPEG is investigating how its current and future suite of standards can address effectively this domain.

The JPEG committee recognizes that the printing industry has widely adopted JPEG image coding technologies and invites companies from that industry to participate in the development of a new part to JPEG (ISO/IEC 10918) entitled Application to printing systems. The new part specifies a set of JPEG features and tools to establish a well-defined common basis that can be used for the interchange of JPEG images across printing products.

JPEG is pleased to announce that the final ballot approval process for the JPEG XR system architecture technical report (ISO/IEC 29199-1) has been completed by ISO/IEC, and the report will soon be formally published. This report provides a technical overview and informative guidelines for applications of JPEG XR image coding (Rec. ITU-T T.832 | ISO/IEC 29199-2). The report will assist the industry in the development of products and applications that make effective use of JPEG XR images. JPEG is also pleased to announce that ISO/IEC has formally published the Motion JPEG XR standard (ISO/IEC 29199-3). The corresponding twin text approved as ITU-T
Recommendation T.833 is now available in pre-published form. The Motion JPEG XR specification will enable the use of timed sequences of JPEG XR encoded images for important applications such as video capture and editing. Additionally, the second edition of the JPEG XR image coding specification (ISO/IEC 29199-2) international standard has now been published by ISO/IEC. It corresponds to the second edition of Rec. ITU-T T.832 recently published by ITU-T, and includes the latest approved revisions to improve the technical consistency and editorial quality of this important standard.

In addition, also ISO/IEC 24800-4 JPSearch Part 4: File format for Metadata embedded in image data (JPEG and JPEG 2000) is published as an International Standard. This part of JPSearch standard provides an interoperable data exchange format between various devices and platforms based on JPEG/JPEG2000 file formats by allowing embedding one or more structured metadata as well as low-level descriptors.

All the technical specifications of JPSearch have reached the FDIS stage and the reference software is under preparation. Since the current work of JPSearch has reached the final stage of the standardization, a new technical report is in preparation, planned to be published by July 2012, to help potential users of the JPSearch framework by providing use case scenarios and several usage examples with detailed XML example instances.

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

"JPEG recognizes the importance of current technology and application innovations that are seeding the domain of high-dynamic range and 3D/Stereoscopic imaging and the committee welcomes new partnerships on this exiting journey," 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 (55th) on July 11-15, 2011 will be hosted by the German National Body in Berlin, Germany.

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.