Welcome to JPEG

UCL Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory
Bâtiment Stévin - Place du Levant 2
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium
www.tele.ucl.ac.be
Contact : Benoît Macq (macq@tele.ucl.ac.be)
Phone : +32 10 47 23 00
Fax : +32 10 47 20 89

Presentation of the Visual Communication Group

The Visual Communication group is attached to the UCL Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory and is composed of 20 persons conducted by Professor Benoît Macq.

Benoît Macq is teaching and doing research works in image processing for visual communications. His main research interests are image compression, image watermarking and image analysis for medical and immersive communications.

Three kinds of activities are covered by the group:

Research in some aspects of Image Processing and Communications: PhD studies are pursued in the domains of compression, analysis of scenes, 3-D medical imaging, watermarking and security.
Development projects and prototypes: The Visual Communication team is carrying out projects in the field of telediagnosis, virtual museums, trusted third parties and smart cards. The team takes part and contributes to standardization bodies like MPEG, DVB or ITU.
Services to industry: The laboratory is taking part in several projects with Belgian and international companies.

JPEG 2000 related activities

Development of the opensource software OPENJPEG

In order to promote the use of JPEG 2000, UCL-TELE is developing and optimizing an open source coder/decoder written in C language, OpenJPEG. This codec can be downloaded freely (BSD license) on the OpenJPEG site. The OpenJPEG decoder is also adapted to decode specific codestreams for a navigation application using the protocol defined by JPEG 2000 Part 9 "JPIP".

Index generator

Under the scope of the 2KAN project, UCL-TELE developed a codestream index generator as defined by the JPEG 2000 part 9 "JPIP". This software receives as input a codestream under J2K format and produces as output a file under a JP2 format. This file contains the required boxes for a JP2 file and also the specific boxes linked to JPIP. In this context, the UCL developed a client application including a graphical interface. This index generator is regularly updated so as to take the requirements of JPEG2000 part 8 "JPSEC - JPEG 2000 Security" and JPEG2000 part 11 "JPWL - JPEG 2000 Wireless" into account.

Promotion of JPEG 2000 in the medical community

The Communications and Remote Sensing laboratory of UCL is also very active in the adoption of JPEG 2000 by the medical imagery community, via its spin-off company Telemis.

Digital Cinema

Researchers are active in the Digital Cinema field. A JPEG 2000 decoder on FPGA has been developed to satisfy the DCI requirements, and is exploited by intoPIX, one of its spin-off companies .