The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is the working group of ISO, International Standard Organisation, that defined the popular JPEG Imaging Standard and more recently the JPEG 2000 for compression used in still image applications. This group convenes three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. In March 2003, they were in Seoul, Korea, for their 29^th meeting.

The four new parts of the official Standard, extending JPEG 2000's capabilities, have taken most of the five day's work in Seoul.

• Part 8- JPSEC covering standardisation of security systems identification and operation, produced a Working Draft in this increasingly critical domain of security in transmission and exploitation.
• Part 9- JPIP, covering the Interactivity tools and Protocol, issued a Committee Draft which will be circulated for ballot before the next meeting in Strasbourg, France in July 2003
• Part 10- JP3D  dealing with volumetric images, produced a Working Draft and a study document for the VM10 user's guide
• Part 11- JPWL is preparing a working draft, reviewing the core experiments and announcing an interim meeting in Lausanne in May

A joint activity with MPEG about ISO MEDIA BASE FORMAT is now referenced as JPEG 2000 Part 12, which defines a common file format between MPEG and Motion JPEG 2000 (both are based on Apple's Quicktime format).

Two new ad-hoc groups were created to address Medical Imaging applications and Digital Cinema, producing working documents to ease the creation of possible new parts in JPEG 2000.

The JPEG  "Historical Archive of JPEG" and an associated bibliography is now open to JPEG members on the web site. Nearly two and half thousand reference documents have already been digitized and indexed for easy retrieval.  JPEG's webmaster, who is managing this section of the web site, also called for contributions for the other sections, namely those dealing with applications, in order to speed up the starting phase for JPEG 2000 by showing the efficiency and versatility of the new Standard.

Dr. Daniel T. Lee of Yahoo! Inc. and JPEG Convener noted that " Now JPEG 2000 is ready for wide marketplace implementations and we can see many major actors stepping into it with their new products "

Presentations of JPEG 2000 applied technology were given by the experts on :

• WG 18 Standard on DSC profile by Scott Houchin (USA), a contribution to the file format group
• Medialiving, a new concept in security operating by substitution of pieces of data and secured distribution of missing pieces, as a contribution to JPSEC by Jean Barda (France)
• Alexis Tzannes (USA) gave a demo of one of the first implementations of Motion JPEG 2000 and the possible flexibility according to the bandwidth, as a contribution to JPEG 2000 Part 3.
• A presentation of an EC funded project called PRIAM, dealing with "mega-images" up to more than 1 gigabyte in size was given by Jerome Meessen (Belgium)
• A presentation on authentication for JPEG 2000 Images, by Dr. Robert Deng (Singapore), as another contribution to JPSEC

More and more conferences are addressing JPEG 2000; a large number of presentations were given since the last meeting (in Russia, France, USA, Italy), and more are announced such as SPIE in San Diego next August, and the First International JPEG 2000 workshop in conjunction with VCIP (in Lugano July 8-11, 2003).

The next (30^th) JPEG Meeting will take place in Strasbourg, France, July 14-18, 2003.

More on the Seoul JPEG session from:

Jean Barda or Richard Clark (pr@jpeg.org) 

Information on JPEG 2000 can also be found at www.jpeg.org.