Document WG1N101434
JPEG DNA reaches Draft International Standard stage at the 111th JPEG meeting
The 111th JPEG meeting was held in virtual mode from 13 to 17 April 2026.
This meeting was marked by several major achievements. JPEG DNA reached the Draft International Standard (DIS) stage after a successful wet-lab experiment, including DNA synthesis/sequencing that allowed a test of reliability in real conditions. Furthermore, the DIS stage was also reached for JPEG XE, the first International standard for coding of visual events; JPEG Pleno Light Field Quality Assessment, which establishes a model for quality evaluation of encoded light fields; JPEG Trust Media Asset Watermarking, which provides watermarking support to media asset authenticity; and JPEG Trust reference software, which will provide a valuable tool for the development of applications using this family of standards. Furthermore, JPEG Pleno Light Field coding, 2nd edition, reached the Final Draft International Stage.
The following sections summarise the main highlights of the 111th JPEG meeting.
JPEG DNA
At its 111th meeting, the JPEG Committee reached a major milestone with JPEG DNA Part 1 (ISO/IEC 25508-1) advancing to the Draft International Standard (DIS) stage. This achievement marks the culmination of a multi-year standardization effort, beginning with the Final Call for Proposals at the 99th JPEG meeting and proceeding through the creation of the Verification Model at the 102nd meeting, the first Working Draft at the 103rd meeting, the Committee Draft, and the study DIS text produced at the 108th meeting. With DIS now reached, the core technical specification for the efficient coding of images into quaternary representations suitable for archival on DNA synthetic polymers is frozen for the first edition of the standard. The JPEG Committee expects publication of Part 1 an International Standard before the end of 2026.
The DIS milestone was accompanied by the successful completion of wet-lab experiments initiated at the 109th JPEG meeting and whose synthesis and sequencing phases were carried out between the 110th and 111th meetings. The sequenced results from the independent parties have now been delivered to the JPEG Committee and analyzed. The experiments confirmed that the information recorded in the DNA solution was successfully extracted and that the corresponding compressed images were correctly decoded, in accordance with the end-to-end workflow defined in the specification, including biochemical constraints, the recovery mechanism used to cope with the noise introduced by the synthesis and sequencing processes, and the procedures for reading the encoded image information back from the synthesized oligonucleotides. These results provide concrete validation that the current specification of JPEG DNA satisfies the conditions required for applications relying on the current state of the art in DNA synthesis and sequencing and represents the first end-to-end demonstration of the standard on real biological media.
JPEG XE
The joint effort between ITU-T SG21 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 on JPEG XE is ongoing, with JPEG XE Part 1 ready to become the first of a series of standards for coding of visual events. During its 111th meeting, the JPEG Committee made substantial progress on the ongoing development of the additional JPEG XE Parts 2, 3, 4, and 5. Technical discussions advanced the work on Part 2, which will define Profiles and Levels, as well as a normative buffer model to ensure safe and interoperable decoder operation across implementations. Further enhancements were made to the code of the open source reference software, which will be published under Part 3 as a proof‑of‑concept and conformance testing implementation. Preparatory work commenced for Part 4, which will establish the structure and scope of formal conformance testing and will become the focus during the coming months. Finally, consensus was reached about Part 5, where the JPEG Committee converged on an ISOBMFF‑based file format design supporting efficient storage, streaming, and precise event timestamping. The JPEG Committee, mandated for the joint effort between ISO/IEC/JTC1/SG29 and ITU-T SG21, remains committed to the development of a comprehensive and industry-aligned standard that meets the growing demand for event-based vision technologies. This collaborative approach underscores a shared vision for a unified, international standard to accelerate innovation and interoperability in this emerging field. The JPEG XE joint AHG (ITU-T SG21 and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG1) was reestablished to continue the JPEG XE standards development. If you are interested, please consider joining this public joint AHG.
JPEG Trust
There have been major advances in all parts of JPEG Trust. Recently, a 2nd edition of JPEG Trust Part 1 - Core Foundation, was published to accommodate assertions for attributions (based on The Dublin Core metadata element set, ISO 15836-1:2017) and declarations of rights (based on the W3C ODRL Information Model 2.2). JPEG Trust Part 2 – Trust profiles and reports extends the framework specified in Part 1 with extended functionalities for Trust Profiles and Trust Reports; it has now entered the DIS stage. JPEG Trust Part 3 – Media asset watermarking, incorporating specific tools and associated assessment methodologies for usage scenarios that rely on invisible watermarking of media assets, has now been released for DIS balloting. The DIS for JPEG Trust Part 4 – Reference Software was also released for balloting; this Part will be extended in the future with additional implementations and test datasets.
A first JPEG Trust Summit is planned on 12-13 November 2026 in London. More information on upcoming events related to JPEG Trust can be found here.
JPEG Pleno
The JPEG Pleno Light Field activity analyzed the DoCR for the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) of the 2nd edition of ISO/IEC 21794-2 (“Plenoptic image coding system (JPEG Pleno) Part 2: Light field coding”). This 2nd edition integrates AMD1 of ISO/IEC 21794-2 (“Profiles and levels for JPEG Pleno Light Field Coding”) and includes the specification of a third coding mode entitled Slanted 4D Transform Mode and its associated profile. It is expected that at the 112th JPEG meeting this new edition will become an International Standard (IS).
The JPEG committee made significant progress in JPEG Pleno Light Field Quality Assessment (Part 7) activities. Key developments were achieved, including the review and finalization of the DIS text for ISO/IEC 21794-7, which was approved for registration at this meeting. Core experiments on light field quality assessment were presented and discussed, contributing to the validation of subjective testing frameworks and the further development of objective metrics, including improvements to learning-based approaches.
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 currently in a mature state. Two amendments, JPEG XS Part 1 and Part 2, are expected to be published in July of 2026. JPEG XS AMD1 provides a new syntax to allow embedding of user-defined metadata at the slice-level in addition to the frame-level that was already possible. JPEG XS Part 2 amendment AMD1 provides additional levels and sublevels, as well as a new frame buffer level, to better support proxy-stream extraction use cases. At its 111th meeting, the JPEG Committee prepared another amendment (AMD2) for JPEG XS Part 2 to define a new raw Bayer profile, called CMainBayer, that supports reducing the implementation complexity compared to the MainBayer profile. It will be an inclusive profile, meaning that existing HighBayer and MainBayer implementations will be capable of decoding the newly proposed CMainBayer profile. A core experiment was issued to verify the proposed parameters and the impact on the coding performance and the potential resource savings. The plan is to issue the DAMD2 text at the next JPEG meeting in July 2026.
JPEG RF
At its 111th meeting, the JPEG committee continued its active exploration of technologies for radiance field representations. Significant progress was achieved, particularly in the areas of quality assessment and visualization methods for radiance fields, where an exploration study was presented and discussed, contributing to a deeper understanding of how radiance field content should be rendered and evaluated in subjective experiments. These discussions support the development of reliable and practical assessment frameworks in preparation for a future Call for Proposals. JPEG also initiated a new exploration focusing on the identification of suitable objective quality metrics and subjectively annotated datasets, as well as the evaluation of metrics’ performance for radiance field content. This work builds on prior efforts covering coding methods, subjective assessment protocols, and trajectory design, and aims to support the development of standardized evaluation methodologies.
In parallel, outreach activities continued to expand community engagement and support the preparation of dissemination materials, while work progresses toward revising the JPEG RF Common Test Conditions. The outcome of these efforts will guide future standardization in radiance field coding.
JPEG AI
At its 111th meeting, the JPEG Committee continued advancing JPEG AI. The Committee reviewed progress in key JPEG AI Core Experiments, including energy-consumption analysis, and bit-exact reconstruction, with results showing promising implementation trade-offs across CPU, GPU, and FPGA platforms. The FPGA implementation was identified as the most energy-efficient, while GPU execution provided the lowest latency. JPEG also reported progress on compressed-domain machine analysis, where JPEG AI latent representations enabled earth-observation segmentation with nearly ten times fewer model parameters. Further work will continue through new Core Experiments on energy consumption, bit-exact reconstruction, and objective and subjective evaluation. This activity reinforces JPEG AI’s role as the first International Standard for end-to-end learning-based image coding and as a technology relevant to both human visualization and machine-oriented applications.
"At the 111th meeting, five JPEG standardization projects reached DIS stage, a testimony to the commitment of its experts who work tirelessly towards the development of efficient standardized solutions that guarantee interoperability between emerging imaging products and services.” 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 JPEG Meeting, the 112th, will be held in Leiria, Portugal, from the 5th to 10th of July 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. 112 will be in Leiria, Portugal, from 5 to 10 July 2026
- No. 113 will be in Hangzhou, China, from 18 to 23 October 2026
A zip package containing the official JPEG logo and logos of all JPEG standards can be downloaded here.
