Privacy and security support for image data is becoming steadily more important seen the fact that image collections are increasingly more stored in distributed and cloud repositories rather than in private repositories. Moreover, social media and online photo repositories, for example, are currently offering insufficient means to secure privacy-sensitive information carried by the picture or to signal associated IPR metadata. Observing that on a daily basis billions of pictures are shared in JPEG legacy formats on these media, it is evident that embedding additional functionality that would safeguard this type of information and functionality would benefit a significant user base.

Hence, the JPEG Committee has launched a new activity called JPEG Privacy & Security. This activity aims at developing a standard for realizing secure image information sharing which is capable of ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual property rights. This activity is not only intended to protect private information carried by images - in the image itself or the associated metadata - but also to provide degrees of trust while sharing image content and metadata based on individual preferences. It is necessary to extend the existing coding standards by adding such preferences. JPEG Privacy & Security will explore ways on how to design and implement the necessary functionality without significantly impacting on coding performance while ensuring scalability, interoperability, and forward and backward compatibility with current JPEG standard frameworks.

A draft Call for Proposals, with all related info, can be found in this document. A final call for proposals will be initiated at the 75th JPEG Meeting that will take place from 27 till 31 March 2017 in Sydney.

To stay posted on the action plan for JPEG Privacy & Security, please regularly consult our website at jpeg.org and/or subscribe to our e-mail reflector.