Overview of JPEG Trust

JPEG Trust (ISO/IEC 21617) provides a framework for establishing trust in media. This framework includes aspects of authenticity, provenance, attribution, intellectual property rights, and integrity through secure and reliable annotation of the media assets throughout their life cycle. The first part, Core Foundation, was published in January 2025.

JPEG Trust arose from an exploration of requirements for addressing mis- and dis-information in digital media. Today's images arise from many sources: digital cameras, film photo scans, photo editing software, artificial intelligence, and combinations thereof. These technological innovations allow us to produce novel new imagery and even new knowledge derived from our media assets, but at the same time, they can confuse and even deceive us. The global cost of mis- and dis-informative media assets is difficult to estimate, but available reported costs suggest that the figure exceeds US$500Bn per year. To take advantage of the beneficial outcomes of modern digital media production technologies, while lessening the negative outcomes, we need to know if and how we can trust the media we encounter.

The JPEG Trust framework is built in compliance with well established JPEG standards as well as other widely adopted industry standards to ensure a smooth integration into existing digital media ecosystems. The framework can be integrated into ecosystems that use any of the JPEG family of standards (including JPEG 1, JPEG 2000, JPEG XS, JPEG XL and JPEG AI). In addition, due to its generic nature, many aspects of the framework can also be applied to other image file formats or other media modalities such as video or audio.

JPEG Trust is a multi-part specification and currently includes the following Parts: