JPEG 2000 Interactive Protocol Reached Final Committee Draft Status

At its meeting, held from 14-18 July 2003, in Strasbourg, France, the Part 9 of the JPEG 2000 family Imaging Standard, called JPIP (JPEG 2000 Interactive Protocol), has been elevated to Final Committee Draft status, which means that after a three months balloting period, it will be promoted to the Final Draft International Standard.

The JPIP standard defines a network protocol that allows for the interactive and progressive transmission of JPEG 2000 images from a server to a client. This protocol allows a client to request only the portions of an image (by region, quality or resolution level) that are applicable to the client's needs. The protocol also allows for the client to access metadata or other contents from the file.

 "The JPEG 2000 Interactive Protocol is designed to provide high level interactivity, efficient data transfer of JPEG 2000 images that enables a wide range of distributed imaging applications, from interactive image browsing to sophisticated image manipulations" said Dr. Daniel Lee of Yahoo! Inc. and Convener of the JPEG Committee (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1).

 Part 6 of the Standard, dealing with Mixed raster content, also called JPM, successfully passed the balloting at the Final Draft International Standard level, last phase before becoming a Standard ready for publication. Significant progress took place in the new working items including JPSEC (Image Security, Part 8), JP3D (Multi-dimensional data, Part 10) and JPWL (Wireless Imaging, Part 9). 

 New MIME sub-types image/jp2, video/mj2, image/jpx, and image/jpm from JPEG 2000 image files family were submitted to IETF for registration.

 A number of presentations and demonstration were given, showing the efforts done to promote and demonstrate the features of JPEG 2000 Standard. They included:

• International Imaging Industry Association (I3A) activity update, in particular CPXe, presented by Jean Barda on behalf of Lisa Walker, president of I3A.
• CAVEAT, a JPSEC application for Authentication and Versioning presented by Jean Barda with a demonstration by David Santos, including registration process, encryption and digital signature.
• Medialiving, another JPSEC application, presented by Jerome Caporossi, with a demonstration of how JPEG 2000 scalability allows for multilevel conditional access.
• RNRT/EIRE, a project presented by Didier Nicholson and Chaker Larabi, about compression algorithm optimization and color quality psychophysical evaluation of a number of encoders.
• JPEG 2000 Digital Cinema applications, presented by Siegfried Fossel, seeking NB comments and contributions in order to prepare a public document for the next meeting.
• Picture Elements' hardware implementation of Part 1 encoder, devoted to high speed applications such as scanners, copiers and motion was presented by Lou Sharpe, President of Picture Elements.

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is the working group of ISO, International Standard Organisation, who defined the popular JPEG Imaging Standard and more recently the JPEG 2000 family of Imaging Standards. This group convenes three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. At its meeting last week they were in Strasbourg, France, over 70 experts from 14 different countries were present at the one-week meeting.

The next (31^st ) JPEG Meeting will take place in Hawaii, USA, December 8-12, 2003.

More on the Strasbourg JPEG session from:
Jean Barda or Richard Clark (pr@jpeg.org) 

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