_{^{Document WG1N101434}}

JPEG XE becomes an International Standard

The 112th JPEG meeting was held in Leiria, Portugal, from 6 to 10 July 2026.

This meeting was marked by several major achievements. JPEG XE final text of the International Standard was issued, and it is expected to be published in the near future by both ISO/IEC and ITU-T as twin texts. This is a major milestone, as JPEG XE defines the first standard for event-based vision, with the support of major industrial and academic players and under the auspices of three standardization organizations.

Additionally, a workshop sponsored by the IEEE SPS Portuguese Chapter, “Standardizing Media in the Generative Era: Advancing Trustworthy Digital Content for Human and Machine Consumption,” was held. This workshop included several talks about learning-based media coding and the effects of learning-based representations on authenticity, ending with a panel discussion.

The following sections summarise the main highlights of the 112th JPEG meeting.

JPEG XE

The joint effort between ITU-T SG21 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 on JPEG XE continues to make significant progress toward establishing a comprehensive international framework for event-based vision coding. At its 112th meeting, the JPEG Committee completed the final International Standard text of ISO/IEC 26112-1 after successful approval of the DIS ballot and requested its publication. This milestone marks JPEG XE as the first international standard for lossless coding of visual events produced by event vision sensors, providing a standardized and interoperable foundation for the rapidly growing event-based vision ecosystem. Developed jointly between ISO, IEC and ITU-T, the standard ISO/IEC 26112 will also be published as ITU-T Recommendation T.841.1 in the near future.

The JPEG Committee also completed the DIS texts of ISO/IEC 26112-2, Profiles and Levels, and ISO/IEC 26112-3, Reference Software, both of which were approved for progression to the DIS stage. Under the joint ISO, IEC and ITU-T collaboration, these standards will also become ITU-T Recommendations T.841.2 and T.841.3, respectively. ISO/IEC 26112-2 includes the Embedded Lossless Constrained Profile, specifically designed to enable interoperability with the MIPI CSI-2 v4.2 Event Stream Protocol (ESP) specification. The profile represents the successful outcome of a close liaison between the MIPI Alliance and the JPEG Committee to promote industry-wide interoperability for event-based imaging systems.

Work will now continue on ISO/IEC 26112-4, which will define formal compliance testing procedures, and on ISO/IEC 26112-5, which will specify file formats and metadata structures for the storage and exchange of event data. In particular, Part 5 will introduce mechanisms enabling synchronization of event timestamps with real-world atomic time references, supporting demanding industrial, scientific, automotive, and machine vision applications. In parallel, the JPEG Committee will explore advanced coding technologies aimed at further improving both lossless and lossy compression efficiency for event data.

The JPEG XE Joint Ad Hoc Group, established under the collaboration between ITU-T SG21/Q7 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1, was reestablished to continue the development of the JPEG XE family of standards. The JPEG Committee remains committed to delivering a unified, open, and internationally recognized framework for event-based vision technologies, accelerating interoperability, innovation, and adoption across this emerging field. If you are interested in contributing to this effort, please consider joining this joint AHG.

JPEG Trust

At the 112th JPEG meeting in Leiria, major advances were made across all parts of JPEG Trust. The 2nd edition of JPEG Trust Part 1 – Core Foundation has been completed and is progressing towards publication, incorporating assertions for attributions and declarations of rights. JPEG Trust Part 2 – Trust Profiles and Reports, which extends the framework specified in Part 1 with functionalities for Trust Profiles and Trust Reports, was promoted to FDIS 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, is currently at the DIS stage. JPEG Trust Part 4 – Reference Software is also at the DIS stage, with further extensions planned to include additional software implementations and test datasets.

Looking ahead, JPEG Trust is expanding its activities to address emerging requirements for media authenticity and transparency, while continuing to evolve the JPEG Trust framework. A revised structure for the JPEG Trust family of standards is being considered to provide a clearer separation between the core trust framework, provenance, attribution, and rights declarations, watermarking, and emerging detection technologies.

Preparations for the first JPEG Trust Summit, to be held on 12–13 November 2026 in London, are well underway. More information on upcoming events related to JPEG Trust can be found on the jpeg.org website.

JPEG DNA

At its 112th meeting, the JPEG Committee continued the standardization and validation activities for JPEG DNA Part 1 (ISO/IEC 25508-1), which is currently undergoing DIS ballot. The DIS stage follows a multi-year standardization effort that began with the Final Call for Proposals at the 99th JPEG meeting and progressed 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. A significant part of the meeting was dedicated to analyzing and continuing the JPEG DNA Core Experiments. In particular, the results of Core Experiment 11 (CE11) were discussed, providing further validation of the end-to-end JPEG DNA workflow on synthetic DNA. The experiment demonstrated the feasibility of recovering and decoding the information stored in DNA while also highlighting areas where further improvements to the decoding process are desirable, especially for the header encoding/decoding. Based on these results, the JPEG Committee identified the need for a further Core Experiment, CE12, aimed in particular at improving and further validating the decoding process under realistic synthesis and sequencing conditions.

JPEG Pleno

JPEG Pleno Light Field Quality Assessment advanced its work on subjective and objective quality assessment activities. The group reviewed the user documentation for the subjective assessment software, further investigated the performance of the deep-learning-based metric currently under consideration for inclusion in the standard, and discussed the next steps for objective quality assessment standardization activities.

At its 112th meeting, the JPEG Committee approved the release of the Common Test Conditions (CTC) for JPEG Pleno Light Field Coding v4.0 document, establishing a unified framework to ensure consistency and comparability across core experiments. The document defines testing procedures, software reference configurations, and environmental settings required to evaluate and compare light field coding solutions accurately. The CTC document is supported by the JPEG Pleno Light Field Coding (LFC) CTC Toolkit, a modular software toolkit with automated scripts for file conversion, coding, and quality metrics to assist in executing the CTC guidelines. AHG.

JPEG XS

JPEG XS, the lightweight low-latency image and video compression standard, continues to expand its capabilities while preserving its core strengths of visually lossless quality, ultra-low latency, and low implementation complexity. Following the 112th JPEG meeting, the JPEG Committee is happy to announce the publication of ISO/IEC 21122-1:2024 AMD1 that introduces the SYM marker to allow user-defined metadata to be embedded at the slice level. This feature can be leveraged to facilitate the needs of video transmission in AR/VR applications. Furthermore, ISO/IEC 21122-2:2024 AMD1, which adds new levels, sublevels, and a frame buffer level to better address proxy-stream extraction use cases, completed the DIS approval process and was issued for publication as a new amendment. The JPEG Committee also progressed ISO/IEC 21122-2:2024 AMD2, which introduces the new CMainBayer profile for raw Bayer content. The profile is designed to simplify implementations while maintaining backward decoding compatibility with existing MainBayer and HighBayer decoders. Following a successful technical evaluation, the amendment was approved to advance to the DIS stage, marking the next step toward standardization.

JPEG AI

At its 112th meeting, the JPEG Committee continued advancing JPEG AI, reviewing progress in its Core Experiments on hardware deployment performance, bit-exact reconstruction, and objective and subjective evaluation. New results were reported for a heterogeneous CPU–GPU–FPGA deployment in which the codec is split at the quantized latent representation, mapping the main analysis and synthesis transforms to GPU and the hyperprior transforms to FPGA, while entropy coding and bitstream handling remain on CPU, and the rate–distortion behaviour is preserved. Evaluated on 100 images at native 2K resolution across five bitrates, this deployment achieved a runtime close to GPU-only execution while reducing energy consumption, yielding an improved end-to-end energy-delay product with respect to both GPU-only and FPGA-only execution. Progress was also reported towards cross-platform reproducible reconstruction, where floating-point convolutions are replaced by per-channel integer arithmetic derived from a two-step quantization procedure; all convolutional layers of the base operating point encoder have now been quantized, with the remaining components to follow. In parallel, a systematic evaluation of JPEG AI was set in motion, encompassing a new dataset and updated common training and test conditions, ablation studies, objective and subjective comparisons with state-of-the-art conventional and learning-based codecs, and a computational complexity assessment. Further contributions addressed low-latency FPGA deployment and compressed-domain processing for geospatial segmentation. AHG.

JPEG RF

At the 112th JPEG meeting, the JPEG Committee made significant progress in its JPEG Radiance Fields activity, which explores future standardization needs for compact and high-quality coding of radiance field representations. A Call for Datasets was finalized to broaden the content available for future benchmarking, advanced discussions on Common Test Conditions and evaluation protocols, and the roadmap toward a future Call for Proposals was reviewed. The meeting also progressed work on subjective and objective quality assessment pipelines, including an extensive evaluation of objective metrics and the identification of promising directions for future anchor coding technologies. These activities strengthen the technical foundation for a transparent and reproducible JPEG RF standardization process.

"At the 112th meeting, the JPEG Committee released JPEG XE as the first ever International Standard for visual event lossless coding, providing a crucial tool for interoperability between event-based imaging systems. This will be instrumental for the success of imaging and machine vision applications that rely on event sensors.” 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 113th, will be held in Hangzhou, China, from the 18th to 23th of October 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. 113 will be in Hangzhou, China, from 18 to 23 October 2026
• No. 114 will be in St. Catarina, Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 31 January to 5 February 2027

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