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.