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76th Meeting - Torino, Italy - JPEG celebrates the 25th anniversary of the first JPEG standard - August 13, 2017


Document WG1N76005

JPEG celebrates the 25th anniversary of the first JPEG standard

JPEG 25th anniversary of the first JPEG standard – JPEG is proud to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its first standard. This very successful standard won an Emmy award in 1995-96 and its usage is still rising, reaching in 2015 the impressive daily rate of over 3 billion images exchanged in just a few social networks. During the celebration, a number of early members of the committee were awarded for their contributions to this standard, namely Alain Léger, Birger Niss, Jorgen Vaaben and István Sebestyén. Also Richard Clark for his long lasting contribution as JPEG Webmaster and contributions to many JPEG standards was also rewarded during the same ceremony. The celebration will continue at the next 77th JPEG meeting that will be held in Macau, China from 21 to 27, October, 2017.

High Throughput JPEG 2000 – The JPEG committee is continuing its work towards the creation of a new Part 15 to the JPEG 2000 suite of standards, known as High Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K). In a significant milestone, the JPEG Committee has released a Call for Proposals that invites technical contributions to the HTJ2K activity. The deadline for an expression of interest is 1 October 2017, as detailed in the Call for Proposals.

The objective of the HTJ2K activity is to identify and standardize an alternate block coding algorithm that can be used as a drop-in replacement for the block coding defined in JPEG 2000 Part-1. Based on existing evidence, it is believed that significant increases in encoding and decoding throughput are possible on modern software platforms, subject to small sacrifices in coding efficiency. An important focus of this activity is interoperability with existing systems and content libraries. To ensure this, the alternate block coding algorithm supports mathematically lossless transcoding between HTJ2K and JPEG 2000 Part-1 codestreams at the code-block level.

JPEG Pleno – The JPEG committee intends to provide a standard framework to facilitate capture, representation and exchange of omnidirectional, depth-enhanced, point cloud, light field, and holographic imaging modalities. JPEG Pleno aims at defining new tools for improved compression while providing advanced functionalities at the system level. Moreover, it targets to support data and metadata manipulation, editing, random access and interaction, protection of privacy and ownership rights as well as other security mechanisms. At the 76th JPEG meeting in Turin, Italy, responses to the call for proposals for JPEG Pleno light field image coding were evaluated using subjective and objective evaluation metrics, and a Generic JPEG Pleno Light Field Architecture was created. The JPEG committee defined three initial core experiments to be performed before the 77th JPEG meeting in Macau, China. Interested parties are invited to join these core experiments and JPEG Pleno standardization.

JPEG XL – The JPEG Committee is working on a new activity, known as Next generation Image Format, which aims to develop an image compression format that demonstrates higher compression efficiency at equivalent subjective quality of currently available formats and that supports features for both low-end and high-end use cases. On the low end, the new format addresses image-rich user interfaces and web pages over bandwidth-constrained connections. On the high end, it targets efficient compression for high- quality images, including high bit depth, wide color gamut and high dynamic range imagery. A draft Call for proposals (CfP) on JPEG XL has been issued for public comment, and is available on the JPEG website.

JPEG XS – This project aims at the standardization of a visually lossless low-latency lightweight compression scheme that can be used as a mezzanine codec for the broadcast industry and Pro-AV markets. Targeted use cases are professional video links, IP transport, Ethernet transport, real-time video storage, video memory buffers, and omnidirectional video capture and rendering. After a Call for Proposal and the assessment of the submitted technologies, a test model for the upcoming JPEG XS standard was created. Several rounds of Core Experiments have allowed to further improving the Core Coding System, the last one being reviewed during this 76th JPEG meeting in Torino. More core experiments are on their way, including subjective assessments. JPEG committee therefore invites interested parties – in particular coding experts, codec providers, system integrators and potential users of the foreseen solutions – to contribute to the further specification process. Publication of the International Standard is expected for Q3 2018.

JPEG Reference Software – Together with the celebration of 25th anniversary of the first JPEG Standard, the committee continued with its important activities around the omnipresent JPEG image format; while all newer JPEG standards define a reference software guiding users in interpreting and helping them in implementing a given standard, no such references exist for the most popular image format of the Internet age. The JPEG committee therefore issued a Call for proposals asking interested parties to participate in the submission and selection of valuable and stable implementations of JPEG (formally, Rec. ITU-T T.81 | ISO/IEC 10918-1).

"The experience shared by developers of the first JPEG standard during celebration was an inspiring moment that will guide us to further the ongoing developments of standards responding to new challenges in imaging applications." said Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi, the Convenor of the JPEG Committee.

About JPEG

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 JBIG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, JPSearch and more recently, the JPEG XT, JPEG XS, JPEG Systems and JPEG Pleno families of imaging standards.

The JPEG group meets nominally three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. The latest 75th meeting was held on March 26-31, 2017, in Sydney, Australia. The next (76th) JPEG Meeting will be held on July 15-21, 2017, in Turin, Italy.

More information about JPEG and its work is available at jpeg.org or by contacting or of the JPEG Communication Subgroup.

A zip package containing the official JPEG logo and logos of all JPEG standards can be downloaded here.

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