New JPEG Standard Supports Printing Industries
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/SC 29/WG 1) and of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG16), responsible for the popular JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR and more recently, the JPSearch and JPEG XT 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 April 22- 26, 2013, in Incheon, Republic of Korea hosted by the Korean National Body.
| JPEG is pleased to announce that the ISO/IEC 10918-6 (JPEG Part 6) Recommendation | International Standard is published. Its creation was proposed by members of the digital printing industry, and more specifically the AFP Consortium, to ensure that applications developed for printing systems can exchange JPEG images. ISO/IEC 10918-6 specifies a minimum set of JPEG features to establish a well-defined common basis for the interchange of JPEG images amongst its printing-related products. Some of these assumptions and basic set of features include support for: |
- a color space for one, three, and four component images;
- component ordering for images with either three or four components;
- color encoding for images encoded with either three or four components;
- a reference value for both black (zero) and white (255) for single component images;
- a reference value for white for images encoded with either three or four components;
- a subset of Start of Frame markers and associated values to represent the supported organization and entropy coding of the underlying images and assumptions made to interpret frequently-encountered APPN markers.
| This subdivision provides a profile for the support of JPEG (ISO/IEC 10918-1 | ITU-T T.81) images in print applications to address the needs of the print industry as presented above. |
This new part of the JPEG standard is in line with JPEG’s strategy to serve more intensively the JPEG ecosystem. Currently, a new wave of standards is being prepared in the context of JPEG XT (ISO/IEC 18477), i.e. JPEG extensions, that feature the original JPEG standard with support for High Dynamic Range image compression, lossy-to-lossless coding and privacy tools. Moreover, WG1 is also investigating how its standards can deploy in the augmented reality markets. Parties interest contributing to this process and the associated markets are welcomed at the WG1 meetings.
ISO/IEC published a new amendment to JPEG 2000 Part 11 - Wireless (ISO/IEC 15444- 11:2007/Amd.1) in support of IP based wireless networks. This Annex provides a virtual interleaving mechanism to increase robustness against data packet losses and erasures. Error protection techniques, such as Unequal Error Protection or any method described in the EPC marker segment, described in this amendment can be applied independently.
JPSearch compliant systems can manage multiple proprietary or community-specific metadata schemas. The multiplicity of schemas is solved by allowing the publication of machine-readable translations between metadata terms belonging to proprietary metadata schemas and metadata terms in the metadata schema provided by JPSearch. In order to rationalize the usage of schemas and translation rules across different JPSearch systems, a global authority for schemas and their translation rules has been established where all JPSearch compliant retrieval applications can obtain the information needed.
JPSearch RA is the official body designated by ISO to serve as a registration authority for Part 2 of ISO/IEC 24800 (JPSearch). The JPSearch RA was assigned to the Distributed Multimedia Applications Group (DMAG) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC BarcelonaTECH). The JPSearch RA entered into full operation early 2013 at JPSearch RA, providing a registration procedure for the publication of metadata schemas and translation rules, that are directly stored in the RA’s internal server. Furthermore, it provides a registry look up service in which the RA displays a list of registered metadata schemas and translation rules on the website. The displayed schema information includes links to the schema and also to its related ISO/IEC 24800-2 translation rules. Registration forms are available and any person or organization is eligible to apply. JPSearch RA does not charge any fee for the registration itself and access to registered information. WG1 experts and external organizations (SDOs, Public administrations, Consortia or Companies) having developed their own metadata sets are invited to register metadata schemas and metadata translation rules they have knowledge about.
“JPEG is honored that the printing sector is engaging into JPEG’s technologies. The committee is currently investigating how it can better serve current and future applications utilizing its technology. We welcome all parties that are interested improving our service to and enlarging the user base of our standards.” 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 (62nd)WG 1 Meeting and its ad hoc group meetings will be held on July 8 – 12, 2013, in London, United Kingdom, hosted by the UK National Body.
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.