Kok Gi Wu

JPEG 2000 for efficent imaging in a client/server environment

The JPEG 2000 image compression system offers significant opportunity to improve imaging over the Internet. The JPEG 2000 standard is ideally suited to the client/server architecture of the web. With only one compressed version stored, a server can transmit an image with the resolution, quality, size, and region custom specified by an individual client. It can also serve an interactive zoom and pan client application. All of these can be achieved without server side decoding while using only minimal server computation, storage, and bandwidth. This paper discusses some of the system issues involved in Internet imaging with JPEG 2000. The choices of the client, passing of control information, and the methods a server could use to serve the client requests are presented. These issues include use of JPEG 2000 encoding and the decoding options in the standard. Also, covered are some proposed techniques that are outside the existing standards.