Press Release For immediate release
Contact Iraj Sodagar, Peter Schelkens (pr@jpeg.org)
February 10, 2012, San Jose, California

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 6 - 10, 2012, in San Jose, California, USA hosted by the US National Body.

JPEG celebrates this year the 20th anniversary of the ITU-T Rec. T.81 | ISO/IEC 10918-1 specification, also known as the JPEG Standard. It is considered to be one of the most successful media standards around. Every day billions of pictures captured by digital cameras and mobile phones are represented in this format. The JPEG specifications was published in 1992, the result of a joint initiative of the then ITU CCITT SG 8 and ISO/TC97/SC2/WG8 groups.

ITU-T and ISO/IEC have sustained a continued effort in the JPEG standard and have maintained the specification according to market needs. At its 57th meeting, JPEG has advanced ISO/IEC 10918-6 Application to printing systems to International Standard status. This new part to the original JPEG suite of standards addresses specific requirements of the printing industry and specifies a subset of features and application tools to aid in the interchange of images encoded according to the JPEG image coding standard (Rec. ITU-T T.81 | ISO/IEC 10918-1) for printing. Currently, JPEG explores possibilities extending its most successful standard for requirements of the 21st century and to enable functionalities such as lossless or high-dynamic range compression in a way that is backwards compatible to existing implementations.

At the San Jose meeting, the JPEG Systems subgroup was established to support an integrating effort to incorporate all current and future JPEG standards in a system framework. Such framework will enable system functionalities beyond the scope of the incorporated specifications. Application domains such as security & privacy and stereoscopic & multi-view imaging will benefit from this initiative. Moreover, metadata and ontological frameworks are intended to open up a wide range of functionalities and new applications. WG1 is welcoming inputs to further seed this initiative.

The final text of ISO/IEC 24800-6 JPSearch Part 6 Reference software was published at this meeting. It includes working software to demonstrate the functionality of all published technical parts of the JPSearch standard. All parties who are interested in exploiting JPSearch technology are welcomed to download the reference software. The JPSearch Reference Software suite contains four independently running software modules:

• The Metadata Translation Module (Part 2) lets users to translate metadata instances from/to one of MPEG-7, Dublin Core and JPSearch Core metadata specifications
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• The JPQF Query Processor Module (Part 3) checks the syntactic and semantic validity of JPQF queries and allows users to search and retrieve data from a provided small-size example metadata file

• The Embedded Metadata Codec Module (Part 4) allows users to embed and retrieve JPSearch Core or MPEG-7 metadata in JPEG or JPEG2000 image files.

• The Repository Import/Export Module (Part 5) provides an example case of importing/exporting to/from a content repository using the XML schema defined in Part 5 and a provided small test database

"The JPEG Standard has been adopted in the marketplace for 20 years and it is more successful then ever. The JPEG committee will continue its efforts to support the further development of this specification and address new and future functionality needs in the market. The JPEG committee is welcoming every actor in the value chain of the JPEG suite of standards to further seed this process." 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 (58th) WG 1 Meeting will be held on July 9 - 13, 2012, hosted by the French National Body in Paris, France.

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.