J. Scott Houchin

File format technology in JPEG 2000 enables flexible use of still and motion sequences

While there exist many different image file formats, the JPEG committee concluded that none of those formats addressed a majority of the needs of tomorrows complicated imaging applications. Many formats do not provide sufficient flexibility for the intelligent storage and maintenance of metadata. Others are very restrictive in terms of colorspace specification. Others provide flexibility, but with a very high cost because of complexity. The JPEG 2000 file format addresses these concerns by combining a simple binary container with flexible metadata architecture and a useful yet simple mechanism for encoding the colorspace of an image. This paper describes the binary format, metadata architecture, and colorspace encoding architecture of the JPEG 2000 file format. It also shows how this format can be used as the basis for more advanced applications, such as the upcoming motion JPEG 2000 standard.

Flexible transmission of metadata in the JPEG 2000 Internet protocol

The JPEG 2000 image compression algorithm and associated file formats create many new opportunities for sharing digital images. Through a highly scalable storage format, a JPEG 2000 image can be accessed at multiple resolutions and quality levels without first decompressing the entire image file and post-processing the data. The JPEG 2000 Internet Protocol (JPIP) provides direct access to this scalability by allowing a client and server to negotiate for the delivery of only portions of the image file, as required by the client. In addition to progressively accessing the coded image data, JPIP allows for “progressive” access to the metadata contained in the file. Through the use of placeholders, the file format header and metadata can be progressively delivered to the client while still maintaining a link to the original file structure. In addition, JPIP allows for XML documents that have been embedded from the file to be searched using XPath. This paper discusses how these two technologies can be used to flexibly access the metadata in a JPEG 2000 file.

JPEG 2000 file format : An imaging architecture for today and tomorrow

While there do exist many different image file formats, the JPEG committee felt that none of those formats addressed a majority of the needs of tomorrows complicated imaging applications. Many formats do not provide sufficient flexibility for the intelligent storage and maintenance of metadata. Others are very restrictive in terms of color encoding. Others provide flexibility, but with a very high cost due to complexity. The JPEG 2000 file format addresses these concerns by combining a simple binary container with a flexible metadata architecture and a useful yet simple mechanism for encoding the colorspace of an image. The format also looks toward the future, where the lines between still images, moving images, and multimedia become a blur, by providing simple hooks into other multimedia standards. This paper describes the binary format, metadata architecture, and colorspace encoding architecture of the JPEG 2000 file format. It also shows how this format can be used as the basis for more advanced applications, such as the upcoming motion JPEG 2000 standard.