Touradj Ebrahimi Elected as JPEG Convener

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, JPSearch and more recently, the JPEG XT, JPEG Systems and JPEG AR 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 July 7 – 11, 2014 in Sapporo, Japan.

Touradj Ebrahimi has been elected as the new Convener of JPEG Committee. He has a longstanding involvement in JPEG, MPEG and SC29 standardisation committees and was currently acting as the Chairman of Advisory Group on Management in SC29. Touradj EBRAHIMI received his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in Electrical Engineering, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. In 1993, he was a research engineer at the Corporate Research Laboratories of Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he conducted research on advanced video compression techniques for storage applications. In 1994, he served as a research consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on very low bitrate video coding. He is currently Professor at EPFL heading its Multimedia Signal Processing Group. He was also adjunct Professor with the Center of Quantifiable Quality of Service at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) from 2008 to 2012.

"I am honoured to be elected as the new Convener of the JPEG standardisation committee. Billions of images are produced on daily basis in JPEG formats and hence I considered it as a huge responsibility to take care that the committee keeps on supporting digital imaging ecosystem and to assure support for functionalities required by future applications and imaging devices." said Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi, the new Convener of the JPEG committee.

At this opportunity, the JPEG Committee wishes to thank the former WG 1 Convener Dr. Daniel Lee (US) for his leadership and vision in the development of the JPEG family of standards. WG 1 wishes to express its deepest thanks and appreciation for his effort and dedication over the last 18 years.

"It was an honour to serve as JPEG Convener over the past 18 years. It was an interesting journey to manage the very successful standards developed by the JPEG Committee. I am convinced that Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi is well placed to continue this endeavour." said Dr. Daniel Lee, former Convener of the JPEG committee.

The JPEG committee is pleased to announce the availability of the committee draft texts of JPEG XT parts 3, 6 and 7. JPEG XT is a scalable and backwards compatible extension of the well-known JPEG coding system (ISO/IEC 10918-1). The extensions address the need for coding images with higher bit-precision and coding of radiance images. JPEG XT provides a flexible and extensible mechanism for representing such images, while staying backwards compatible to the plethora of applications based on JPEG, more specifically:

• JPEG XT Part 3 defines an extension of the JFIF file format specified in JPEG Part 5 (ISO/IEC 10918-5) that allows extensions for future applications beyond JPEG XT, for example enabling privacy protection of images. It integrates into the JPEG Systems framework defining common functionalities and features across the JPEG family of standards;
• JPEG XT Part 6 specifies an integer coding system for images of bit precisions between 9 and 16 bit, as for example required for modern camera equipment using professional sensors;
• JPEG XT Part 7 is a scalable and extensible standard for compression of HDR photos and addresses the requirements of HDR photography.

Seen visually lossless coding has become important in many consumer and industrial applications, Part 2 of Advanced Image Coding and Evaluation Methodologies (AIC) addresses the evaluation procedure for assessing visually lossless coding. JPEG has defined a set of experiments to assure that measurement procedures reliably and consistently evaluate coding systems for visually lossless behaviour. JPEG calls for industry and academic participation to test these experiments. Results from independent evaluations are to be reviewed at the next JPEG meeting in October 2014. For information regarding the experiment and related Specifications, please contact the WG 1 Convenor.

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 for this high-traffic site.

The next (67th) WG 1 Meeting and its ad hoc group meetings will be held on October 20-24, 2014, in Strasbourg, France.