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JPEG Trust Media Asset Watermarking reaches Committee Draft stage at the 110th JPEG meeting

The 110th JPEG meeting was held in Sydney, Australia, from 11 to 16 January 2026.

This meeting was marked by several major achievements: JPEG Trust Part 3 Media Asset Watermarking that will extend JPEG Trust Core Foundation providing signalling capabilities for content authenticity, provenance, integrity, intellectual property rights, and labelling using watermarking. Furthermore, the first event-based codec, JPEG XE, reached the Draft International Standard stage.

In addition, the JPEG Committee celebrated the 25th birthday of the successful JPEG 2000 standard with a social event where members who had served the Committee shared their experience during the development of this important family of standards.

The following sections summarise the main highlights of the 110th JPEG meeting.

JPEG Trust

Current technologies, especially the rise of generative AI, make synthetic creation and modification of media assets easy for general users. Media artefacts such as synthetic images and video increase the risks of online piracy, cyber security fraud, copyright breach, advertising misrepresentation and the spread of mis- and disinformation.

The JPEG Trust International Standard (ISO/IEC 21617-1) provides a framework for establishing trust in media assets, and has now been extended to include Part 3: Media Asset Watermarking (ISO/IEC 21617-3), to provide watermarking support for media asset authenticity.

This new part of the JPEG Trust framework provides a mechanism to empower businesses, governments and institutions to support critical use cases from labelling AI-generated media assets to Digital Rights Management and source tracing. This is in addition to its many applications in helping secure media asset authenticity.

In a major milestone achieved during the 110th JPEG meeting in Sydney, Part 3: Media Asset Watermarking reached the Committee Draft stage. It is expected that this standard will have a significant positive impact globally, as it directly responds to the urgent calls for watermarking functionality by governments around the world in response to the proliferation of AI-generated content online.

JPEG XE

JPEG XE is a joint effort between ITU-T SG21 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 and will become the first internationally endorsed specification by major standardization bodies ITU-T, ISO, and IEC, for coding of events. It aims to establish a robust and interoperable format for efficient representation and coding of events in the context of machine vision and related applications. To expand the reach of JPEG XE, the JPEG Committee has closely coordinated its activities with the MIPI Alliance with the intention of developing a cross-compatible coding mode, allowing MIPI ESP signals to be decoded effectively by JPEG XE decoders.

Currently, JPEG XE Part 1, which defines the core coding system, is under DIS ballot and the JPEG Committee is awaiting the results. In the meantime, work started on Parts 2 and 3, which will define the Profiles and levels, and the Reference software, respectively. For both parts, a Committee Draft (CD) was created and their consultation was requested. The Profiles and levels in Part 2 will provide strict definitions to allow safe and correct interoperability between vendor specific implementations of the standard. The software for Part 3 will serve as a proof of concept implementation of an encoder and decoder of JPEG XE. The plan is to make the software free and open source to allow the community easy access to the JPEG XE technology.

Finally, work on Part 4 was also initiated to provide official and well-defined conformance tests. This will help vendors to verify interoperability and conformance to the standard.

The JPEG Committee remains committed to the development of a comprehensive and industry-aligned standard that meets the growing demand for event-based vision technologies. The collaborative approach between multiple standardisation organisations underscores a shared vision for a unified, international standard to accelerate innovation and interoperability in this emerging field. The JPEG XE public and joint AHG (ITU-T SG21 and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG1) was reestablished to continue the work. If you are interested, please consider joining the joint AHG.

JPEG AIC

The JPEG AIC-3 standard, which specifies a methodology for fine-grained subjective image quality assessment in the range from good quality up to mathematically lossless, is ready to be published as International Standard ISO/IEC 29170-3 in February this year. An implementation of the corresponding data analysis has been provided in MATLAB and will be ported to Python. For the current JPEG AIC-4 effort and evaluation of the responses to the call for Objective Image Quality Assessment, an image dataset for the large-scale subjective experiment was finalized, consisting of 18,000 compressed images for 70 source images and 17 codecs, including several learning-based methods. The crowdsourcing experiment is expected to take several weeks.

JPEG 2000

JPEG XS

JPEG XS, the image and video compression format for transmitting visually lossless, high-quality pictures with minimal latency and low resource consumption, is a fundamental game-changer for real-time video transmission in live, professional, and broadcast applications. In this context, the JPEG Committee created an AMD1 for JPEG XS Part 2 to define some additional levels and sublevels, as well as a new frame buffer level. These additions each address specific requirements that came from the respective industry sectors that rely on JPEG XS. This new AMD1 for Part 2 was issued for DIS balloting. In the meantime, the ballot results for AMD1 for JPEG XS Part 1 were processed, and an FDIS ballot was initiated. Both AMDs are expected to be published before the end of this year.

JPEG RF

At the 110th JPEG meeting, JPEG RF made significant progress against its mandates, formally approving the Use Cases and Requirements for JPEG Radiance Fields v1.0 and requesting its public release on the JPEG website. Substantial technical discussions advanced the evaluation and assessment pipeline for radiance fields, covering both coding-only and joint instantiation and coding approaches. The Working Group also approved Exploration Study 7, including the study on pair-wise comparison assessment methodologies for radiance fields. In addition, next steps were agreed for outreach activities to engage additional stakeholders.

JPEG AI

During the 110th JPEG meeting, JPEG AI was focused on implementation aspects and on extending its applicability across devices and use cases. First, the Use Cases and Requirements document was updated, introducing a new video streaming and storage use case that positions JPEG AI as a deterministic still-image coding engine that can be integrated into video coding pipelines.

A new core experiment addresses the bit-exact reference frame reconstruction requirement. Moreover, other core experiments were defined to analyze power consumption on heterogeneous CPU–GPU/FPGA platforms and to retrain JPEG AI in the RGB domain for fair comparison with other codecs. Looking ahead, JPEG AI plans to develop mobile-ready encoder and decoder implementations, investigate error-resilience properties, and continue benchmarking JPEG AI against state-of-the-art learnt image codecs using solid and robust test conditions.

JPEG DNA

The wet-lab experiments, including DNA synthesis/sequencing, designed at the 109th JPEG meeting were completed, and the synthesized results have been delivered to the JPEG Committee as DNA molecules. As a next step, independent parties are carrying out sequencing separately, and the sequenced results are expected to be available by the next JPEG meeting, when the JPEG DNA, a.k.a. ISO/IEC 25508-1, will reach the DIS stage.

JPEG Pleno

During the 110th JPEG meeting, the JPEG Committee reviewed the outcomes of the subjective quality assessment conducted on the evaluation dataset with the aim to examine the performance of the proposals submitted in response to the Call for Proposals on objective metrics for JPEG Pleno Light Field Quality Assessment. The performance of submitted metrics was analysed across scenes with diverse spatial and angular resolutions and for both coding-only and joint coding and view-synthesis artefacts, highlighting differences in behaviour across distortion categories. Learning-based proposals were recognized as a promising direction, particularly when cross-validated on the evaluation dataset, while also raising considerations related to training, data dependency, and reproducibility. The evaluation phase was formally closed, with agreement to retain a set of well-established full-reference metrics as reference anchors and to pursue a combined technical direction integrating end-to-end and hybrid learning-based approaches. Finally, responsibilities across task forces were consolidated, and next steps were defined to continue the objective quality assessment work towards a first version of a working draft.

Highlights of JPEG 2000 25th Anniversary Celebrations, Sydney, 14 January 2026

The 110th JPEG meeting in Sydney offered a fitting occasion to mark the 25th anniversary of JPEG 2000 standardization. Opening the celebration, Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi, JPEG convenor, noted that it was in Sydney during the 12th JPEG meeting in 1997 that JPEG 2000 proposals were evaluated, culminating in the publication of the standard in December 2000.

The program featured a video message from Prof. Michael Marcellin, a key contributor to several core technologies adopted by JPEG 2000 and chair of the subsequent software verification model effort. He highlighted the successful deployment of JPEG 2000 for digital distribution of motion pictures and the essential standards work involved in defining the digital cinema profiles that enabled this adoption.

Prof. David Taubman, whose long-standing leadership and technical contributions continue to shape JPEG 2000 development, delivered a presentation highlighting the coding tools that underpin the format’s highly scalable and accessible codestreams. He also outlined recent progress in High Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K), including implementations achieving high performance, full float lossless compression for OpenEXR and FPGA based realizations delivering high speed, low latency coding.

Messages from Prof. Majid Rabbani and Dr. Daniel Lee—both instrumental in guiding the JPEG 2000 standardisation process—paid tribute to the dedication, expertise, and collaborative spirit of the many JPEG members who contributed to the standard’s success. Daniel, who served as JPEG convenor during the JPEG 2000 standardisation period, further underscored JPEG’s essential role as a collaborative international forum for developing standards with global reach.

The celebration concluded with an address by Dr. Pierre Anthony Lemieux, co-chair of the JPEG 2000 activity, who highlighted the format’s enduring flexibility as a key factor in its longevity. He noted that this flexibility allows end users to expand the capabilities of their workflows without the burden of switching to a different codec. Dr. Lemieux also emphasised the importance of ongoing maintenance activities, which allow JPEG 2000 to evolve to meet the shifting needs of its users, including current work on defining HTJ2K profiles and levels. He finished by stressing the importance of open source tools and libraries in driving adoption.

A sustained commitment to meeting industry needs and continued maintenance of the standard remains central to the ongoing and future success of JPEG 2000.

"Reaching Committee Draft for JPEG Trust Part 3: Media Asset Watermarking is a pivotal step toward restoring confidence in digital media at a moment when generative AI makes convincing manipulation accessible to anyone. This milestone equips industries and public institutions with interoperable, standards-based watermarking to support authenticity, provenance, integrity, rights signalling, and clear labelling, helping to curb mis- and disinformation, strengthen digital rights management, and enable reliable source tracing at a global scale.” 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 Organization for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission, (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1) and of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG21), responsible for the popular JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG Systems and more recently, the JPEG XS, JPEG Pleno, JPEG XL, JPEG AI, JPEG Trust, JPEG DNA and JPEG XE families of imaging standards.

The JPEG Committee nominally meets four times a year. The next 111th JPEG Meeting will be held online, from 13 to 17 April 2026. More information about JPEG and its work is available at jpeg.org or by contacting of the JPEG Communication Subgroup. If you would like to stay informed about JPEG activities, please subscribe to the jpeg mailing lists.

Future JPEG meetings are planned as follows:

• No. 111 will be held online, from 13 to 17 April 2026
• No. 112 will be in Leiria, Portugal, from 5 to 10 July 2026

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