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ISO image experts meeting in Arles
JPEG2000 part 5 reaches Committee Draft Status

JPEG2000 extends its work by proposing new parts 6 and 7 to be added to its standard

July 7th, 2000-Arles, France. During the week of July 3rd to 7th, 2000, the ISO working group in charge of "coding of still pictures", better known as JPEG, held its 20th meeting in Arles, France. The meeting was convened by WG1 Convener, Dr. Daniel T. Lee, of Hewlett-Packard Company.

Hosted by SACD on behalf of the French National Body, 92 international experts from 17 countries convened, to resume their work on creating and disseminating standards for the interchange of images in electronic form, particularly JPEG 2000, the new emerging standard for image compression which is currently planned to be released in 7 parts. Editing Committee of Part 1 of the JPEG2000 standard worked with the help of other WG1 members to address the National Body comments that were made on the Part 1 Final Committee Draft (FCD), and to resume work on revising the FCD based on these comments.

National Bodies still have until July 17, 2000 to make finalized comments on the FCD. Publication of the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) is scheduled for September 2000, and final release for publication as an International Standard (IS) is anticipated in December 2000.

The results of core experiments defined in the previous WG1 meeting were also reviewed and recommendations were made to update the Verification Model (VM) which acts as a 'proof of concept for the standard, and the Working Draft for part 2 of the JPEG2000 standard which adds some important extensions, including a more comprehensive file format (JPX). The group was also able to improve the clarity of the JP2 file format, producing a document that provides a strong foundation for future JPEG2000 extensions, such as the JPX, JPM and MJ2 (Motion JPEG2000) file formats.

Work on part 3 of the Standard, known as Motion JPEG2000, also progressed. The document reached the important stage of "Working Draft" Motion JPEG2000 is planned to become an International Standard in November 2001, and should have important application in the next generation of digital cameras and elsewhere.

Part 4 of the Standard deals with Conformance Testing, a key function to assure the interoperability of various implementations of the standard by the widest community of developers. The Conformance team produced a Working Draft at the Arles meeting.

Part 5 of the JPEG 2000 Standard contains reference software which implements the basic features of Part 1, and is due to be disseminated for both non-commercial and commercial users. A Committee Draft of Part 5 of the standard was also produced at Arles meeting, together with two releases of code - one in Java and one in C. Due to increased interest in JPEG2000 and its growing importance in various applications and business models, it was decided to add two further parts to the standard.

A Part 6 will deal with file format issues for compound images based on a mixed raster approach, allowing JPEG2000 and other coding schemes to be mixed in a common environment.

Part 7 will contain a Technical Report (TR) outlining guidelines for minimum support of Part 1 of the Standard.

Both Parts 6 and 7 are planned to follow an aggressive development schedule and are expected to be finalized by July 2001.

The five days of hard work and meetings went smoothly thanks to the excellent organization by Claude Rollin (SACD/France) and his team. Among the many highlights of the meeting was a visit by the representative of the Mayor of Arles on Tuesday July 4th, who after a very interesting speech presented each Head of Delegation with a medal of the City of Arles. This was followed by a surprise - a giant cake with fireworks to celebrate the 'American Independence Day' with a champagne toast. Another special time was the social event 'Camargue Party' where the participants were introduced to traditional Camargue activities with Bulls and an excellent dinner with Flamenco entertainment. During the week, the various events and meetings were covered and illustrated by J-Cl Bauer who produced some excellent cartoons of many of our delegates.

The next meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 will be held in Rochester, NY, USA, August 16-18, 2000 at the kind invitation of the United States National Body and will be hosted by Eastman Kodak Company and Xerox Corporation.

More information about the JPEG activities and status is available on the JPEG web site or contact:

Dr. Daniel Lee
Hewlett-Packard Company,
11000 Wolfe Road MS 42U0,
Cupertino, CA 95014, USA
Tel: +1 408 447 4160
Fax: +1 408 447 2842
E-mail: daniel_lee@hp.com

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