Press Release      For immediate release
Contact Iraj Sodagar, Peter Schelkens (pr@jpeg.org)
November 24, 2011, Lausanne, Switzerland

ISO/IEC publishes JPSearch Part 5: "Data interchange format between image repositories" as an International Standard (ISO/IEC 24800-5)

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a Working Group of ISO/IEC, the InternationalOrganisation 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 November 21-24, 2011 in Lausanne, Switzerland hosted by EPFL and the Swiss National Body.

WG1 is pleased to announce that ISO/IEC 24800-5 JPSearch Part 5: Data interchange format between image repositories is published as an International Standard. This part of JPSearch provides a data interchange format for the exchange of image collections and respective metadata between JPSearch compliant repositories. It enables the synchronization of repositories across different devices and platforms by providing an easy and reliable data transfer mechanism overheterogeneous as well as homogeneous platforms. In particular, JPSearch Part 5 provides the following functionalities:

• exchange of data between JPSearch repositories on different devices and platforms;
• consolidation of metadata generated on different systems;
• transferal of data to a newer and better system;
• consolidation of selected data to a centralized repository; and
• archive of data in a format which will survive current products.

ISO also published ISO/IEC TR 29199-1:2011, which provides a technical overview and informative guidelines for applications of JPEG XR image coding. The overview of JPEG XRcoding technology includes a description of the supported image formats, the internal dataprocessing hierarchy and data structures, the image tiling design supporting hard and soft tiling of images, the lapped bi-orthogonal transform, supported quantization modes, adaptive coding and scanning of coefficients, entropy coding, and the codestream structure. It also provides guidelines for scalable coding of images using the JPEG XR standard.

When DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives LLC) decided in 2005 to use JPEG2000 for distribution of movies to theatres, SMPTE and ISO spent within the next years a lot of efforts to standardize so-called DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) as movie distribution formats to theatres. According to ScreenDigest the majority of cinema screens (>50%) is predicted to be digital by January 2012. Today we have around 60.000 digital screens and nearly all digital cinema screens use JPEG2000 technology.

The WG 1 group approved at this meeting the second edition of the JPEG 2000 multilayer compound image file format (JPM or JPEG 2000 Multi-Layer), which is standardized as JPEG 2000 Part 6 (ITU-T Rec. T.805 | ISO/IEC 15444-6) (ISO/IEC, 2002. It serves as a file format to represent multipage raster images containing a mixed content, such as photo images, text, or artificially generated figures. With JPM it is possible to represent a multipage mixed-content document in one or multiple files, compressing different parts with different compression algorithms. Among the supported compression algorithms are JPEG and JPEG 2000 for continuous-tone images and JBIG for bi-level imagery (ITU-T Rec. T.82 | ISO/IEC 11544).

Corrigendum 1 of ITU-T Rec. T.809 | ISO/IEC 15444-10:2008 defining a set of lossless and lossy compression methods for coding continuous-tone, bi-level, grey-scale, color digital volumetric images, or multi-component volumetric images has been approved and an updated version of the specification will be published.

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 technologies in terms of quality, complexity and functionality. It also includes recommendations and application dependent evaluation methodologies for the areas of medical, security and camera sensors imaging. The committee is expecting the promotion of the guidelines to a Proposed Draft Technical Report (PDTR) at the 57th WG1 San Jose meeting, Feb. 6-10, 2012. WG1 is workingclosely with the COST IC1003 group (QUALINET, http://www.qualinet.eu/) on the production of recommendations related to stereoscopic/multiview and HDR images.

"The publication of JPSearch Part 5 is an important milestone in the standardization process of the JPSearch framework since it enables interoperability through unlocking the metadata information contained by different image repositories," said Dr. Daniel Lee, 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 (57th ) will be held on February 6-10, 2012, hosted by the US National Body in San Jose, California.

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