JPEG2000: Is It The Future Of Imaging? 130
LISNews writes: "EE Times has a cool story on the pending JPEG2000 standard and how it will change what we see on the Web. They are already thinking wireless: 'The killer app for JPEG2000 is a handheld device combining both Internet applications and wireless access.'" They're also thinking about migration from current formats, smooth degradeability and -- nice to hear -- Open Source acceptance. Try JPEG's own JPEG2000 page for more information and links.
Re:Hmm (Score:1)
ALL NON ALPHABETIC CHARACTERS DELETED DUE TO STUPID NON FUNCTIONAL ASCII ART FILTER. FIX THAT DAMN THING WILL YOU
Redundant again! Please reconsider your priorities (Score:5)
Good lord, I'm really getting tired of this! If you guys can't read and remember your own front page (as you've admitted you don't) then it means that you (as individuals) aren't picking topics that you (as a group) find essential reading -- and that's a terrible sign!
There's so much interesting stuff going on, but they seem to find the same old stories over and over, perhaps 1/3 of the accepted stories are retreads. CmdrTaco et al -- we love you, but maybe it's time to go to a community moderated article selection with occassional "automatically accepted" posts by you guys.
if you can't remember or even do a search on old topics when picking a new one, you are too overloaded to be doing a good job at the task of selecting topics.
There are so many other areas where we'd rather have you guys using your impressive talents!
At the very least, can we see a quarterly thread to select the "best-of" suggestions for improving SlashDot, the way we select questions for interviews? Call it a step towards RMS's view of community-based Open source, if you will, but repeats and other bad thread decisions serve no one, and I like
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Re:404 (Score:1)
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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.
one word - WAP (Score:1)
Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:2)
The JPEG encoder was based on a direct implementation of the DCT.
Further, 2/3s of the images they looked at were outside of JPEG territory. They were sharp-edged patterns, or text. That's what GIFs are for!
That's the conventional wisdom, but JPEG2K apparently does perform well with text. In any case, it's part of the experimental process to compare the performance with different classes of images.
I wonder if Chew and Choo were "expected" to get certain results...
Not at all.
Re:Hmm (Score:1)
It wasn't my signature at all (which is non-existent). I'm not sure if it objected to the use of the not-equal sign, or the presence of the quotation mark next to the period or something, but it thought I was gettin' jiggy with some ascii art, which I most certainly was not.
I think it was the server(s) getting high on some of Hemos's $3 crack.
Re:Do we care? (Score:1)
now if only we could get people to adopt a standard of total filesize... instead of, "use big image, it's good, painful for modem user, and helps site in no way!". just bitter....
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Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:2)
I took a look at Raph Levien's results, and tried to understand how such good results were obtained with JPEG. I think I understand now: the process of smoothing (I assume that the GIMP smooths before downsampling to reduce aliasing) then downsampling, then compressing is actually similar to the wavelet approach (read my description of wavelet compression posted earlier), except that wavelets allow of more levels of hierarchy, and different types of wavelet filters can be applied.
If anything, Raph Levien's results are a validation of the wavelet/JPEG2K approach to image compression.
Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:2)
Real error image analysis (using l2-norm, or perceptually based models) can be used to give a better "picture" of the type of improvements that JPEG 2000 offers.
MPEG2K (Score:1)
It is markedly different from MPEG-2.
Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:1)
JPEG2000 might not be too great an improvement, but it looks to be an improvement nonetheless.
Corel Designer has a good artical about this... (Score:1)
Worth a read if you've a web designer etc...
Incorrect Timestamps (Score:1)
Mycroft-X
PNG or JPEG2K - which to use? (Score:2)
It is highly likely that JPEG2K will be included in Netscape, IE and Opera browsers. JPEG2K allows one to set (at the user level) how much compression one needs, and allow one to have different ratios for print downloads and viewing downloads - for example, when printing, I might want 300 to 600 dpi, but while viewing, 90 dpi might be fine for me.
All that said, apparently PNG is still better. But will it be included in IE, Netscape/Mozilla and Opera? OK, one down. But implementations are still not good.
All in all, a better method than JPEG in actual use would be JPEG2K, and it's a good bet it will be available for all browsers, whereas PNG is still hobbled a bit. And much more Open Source!
Re:porn (Score:3)
Yeah, but unless you laminate the paper right after printing, it doesn't clean as easily as a monitor. Yet another reason the why WWW has made the printed pr0n industry obsolete. Thanks anyway.
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Re:Is this technology doomed? (Score:1)
Disclaimer: I hate the DMCA and the MPAA, too. I just thought this guy was a little off-topic.
Re:It does have applications beyond PORN ! (Score:1)
Yes, and so do water-based lubricants, ADSL, 40GB disks, and Kleenex.
I'm wondering how long it will take for our wonderful GPLed graphics apps to support this. Like The GIMP and pornviewer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HElectric Eyes.
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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.
Re:Is this technology doomed? (Score:1)
Loki uses it for some of their game videos...
Re:some of this is plain wrong (Score:2)
An automatic, thumbnailing Usenet binary decoder. Something that grabs the first x bytes of an image, and produces a thumbnail of x quality.
For wireless access devices without sufficient CPU/RAM to decode the images themselves, as a proxy filter. As the display is of highly limited resolution, it's silly to send huge images across such an expensive link. While it's currently possible (see freshmeat.net) to obtain image downsampling and/or quality reduction in a proxy, it amounts to much wasted bandwidth as bits are literally tossed away at the proxy. JPEG 2000 (that name must die) would alleviate the bandwidth crunch at the head end, by requiring the proxy to only aquire a small portion of the original image to possibly resample and transmit via whatever proprietary means to the wireless web browser.
Stock photography CD-ROMs (and websites) would benefit from the format, as well. Even with really-fast CD-ROM drives, PhotoCDs are expensive (time-wise) to preview and select from. Thumbnails could instead be generated arbitrarily, and on the fly. This also eliminates the tangle of often-nasty software (or inherently inefficient HTML) that often accompanies digital stock photography.
Once in awhile, standards are good. Particularly the openly-adoptable sort. Before GIF, we had PCX, a slew of more-proprietary formats, and very few images being shared. After GIF, anyone could get images from anyone else, and there was much rejoicing (and sending about of pictures and graphs and data and...).
Then, along came JPEG. It took some time to be adopted, namely because of people viewing them with fixed 8-bit palettes under Windows. I recall many a flamewar in the BBS age about this topic. The Windows folk didn't like the way JPEGs looked, all grainy and ugly and, well, dithered. In the other corner, I had a Diamond Speedstar 24x, displaying 24-bit color in cshow under MS-DOS, and there simply was no comparison.
Eventually, mass market display technology grew up a bit, and more people were able to see thousands of colors at once instead of 256. At exactly the same time as this was happening, GIFs began to fall by the wayside, and JPEG grew to become king of the interchange formats.
A couple of years after that, The Powers That Be at Unisys struck down with great fury and vengeance, which more-or-less signed the death certificate for GIFs in common historical usage, though GIF web-button-diddies persist.
At this point, there were two competing formats on the web, both with drastically different claims to fame. GIFs are big, but lossless, transparent, animated, and patented. JPEGs are small and have more colors, but are lossy, opaque, static, and free.
Realizing that something must be done, the Something Must Be Done crowd chimed in and proposed PNG, the bastard sibling of GIF. Alpha channel blending, progressive display, 24-bit lossless color, and patent free. All good, all fine, except nobody cares about lossless compression in web pages (save screenshots, drawings) or porn.
Thus, years later, PNG is 'out there.' It's not in widespread use because the files are too large, and it doesn't offer any compelling improvements in bandwidth- or storage-limited enviroments (and no, the available alpha channel doesn't make up for that in everyday use). Besides, a number of browsers *still in common use* just don't support PNG, and never will. (WebExplorer, anyone?)
Reducing the palette size of a PNG file is silly, too. It amounts to lossy compression of a particularly nasty sort. I don't know about you, but I can *see* the difference between 16- and 24-bit color on most images (web page graphics and other cartoons excluded, of course). A photograph of a sunset should have a smooth gradient from baby blue sky to the angry red of the sun (or whatever colors it is that evening), not something that has defined color regions like a paint-by-number.
Eight years ago, I picked up a SoundBlaster 1.5. Back then, sound files of even the 11KHz mono 8-bit format recorded by the SoundBlaster were considered huge. Creative Lab's answer? The VOC format, which allowed truncation of the files down to 6, 4, or 2 bits per sample. Viola! Small files, and shitty quality.
In another historical (or current, depending on how long you've been around) example, MPEG (and other perceptual) encoding of audio was shown to be dramatically better than truncation. I'll spare the details here since everyone here knows them, but time and time again, perceptual encoding (irrespective of medium or technique) has been shown to be superior to truncation or throwing away of data.
And before anyone says "But, PNG is *dithered* down to a reduced color depth, which makes it OK," I'll have to disagree. Sony has a dithering process by which they record sound at 20 bits per sample, and reduce it to 16 for use in CD players. The remaining 4 bits are dithered into the LSB, which does allow some percieved hearing of sounds below the normal threshhold of a CD. Does this make 20-bit digital audio come out of an off-the-shelf CD player? No. Is it a little better than normal 16-bit PCM? Probably. Is it better than a hypothetical 20-bit MPEG stream at the same bitrate (172kBps)? Fuck no. And in the specific case of dithering a digitized visual image, it is almost always blatantly obvious that dithering has been applied. Have you ever tried to scale a dithered image, or print one using halftones? Ever see what the current crop of so-so monitors does to a dithered image (can we say Moire patterns, boys and girls)? etc. etc.
Simply because JPEG 2000 does all of the things that PNG does, and all of the things JPEG does, does not make it unuseful. It should show to offer substantially improved usability over either format. Whether or not one considers this usability to be important or not is dictated by the limitations of that person's creativity.
Re:hmph - IE jpeg extension planned (Score:1)
Anybody got the scoop on this one? I hear the MS extension is supposed to be 50% faster and result in 50% less data loss at all levels of compression. If so, looks like it may become the defacto standard, just like IE is the "standard" web browser for those desiring access to the latest technological innovations.
Re:too late: download gnutella, search for ".asf" (Score:1)
There have been a few good ASF releases, but nowadays they're making "DivX
porn (Score:1)
Rock 'n Roll, Not Pop 'n Soul
MPEG 4 Now! (Score:2)
404 (Score:2)
...Over many a strange and spurious website of 'hot chicks galore',
...While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
...And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour.
..."'Tis not possible," I muttered, "give me back my cheap hardcore!" -
Quoth the server, "404".
hmph (Score:1)
mpeg2000 (Score:1)
JPEG2000.. Bah! (Score:1)
in this web-based world, JPEG2000 offers nothing to the end user until their browser supports it, and supports it properly.
So i won't be holding my breath, and frankly, couldn't be much more apathetic about the adoption of wavelet compression, which was invented frickin years ago.
Re:porn (Score:1)
Re:Another PNG? (Score:1)
A chance for mozilla to take the lead? (Score:2)
If this really is a "clean" spec, then it looks like this could be an oportunity for Mozilla to take the lead in image processing. It better be squeeky clean or else, in 5 years, we'll end up right back into the same GIF/PNG debate of today.
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Re:Is this technology doomed? (Score:1)
Still pictures must be invented before animated pictures. Perhaps I am pre-topic instead of off topic.
Re:Incorrect Timestamps (Score:1)
About patents? (Score:1)
Re:Is this technology doomed? (Score:1)
Maybe I have had too many temporal anomalies. I'm post-topic.
Protection from being coopted? (Score:3)
I'd sure hope the new one has some kind of teeth designed to bite anyone trying crap like that.
Re:404 (Score:1)
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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.
A Lot Of Buzzwords (Score:2)
This article went on about how this fits in with XML and wireless, handheld Internet access.
Who gives a shit? The question remains: is it a *better* format? Any fool can stuff GIFs or BMPs into a tiny format that will display on crappy screens. Unless they're planning on inventing millions-of-colour Palm screens, that's not so useful. XML? C'mon, that's a tacked-on technology, and they know it.
Looks like the Joint Picture Experts Group consists of a lot of people that decided they wanted to hop on the year's bandwagon. If this was JPEG1997, they would have said that it's perfect for use in 'push.' If in were JPEG1999, we'd be told that it's fully compatible with voice technology to be able to audibly view images through a phone.
God knows what JPEG2001 one will involve. They'll probably tout it as being "fully Linux-integrated."
-Waldo
Re:Is this technology doomed? (Score:1)
The MPAA would likely develop software that would search files on a users computer for the ID or DWM.
Re:PNG is already DOA (Score:1)
Anonymous Cowards start out with 0.
Re:Of course IP issues would kill JPEG2000 (Score:1)
Re:A chance for mozilla to take the lead? (Score:1)
Re:Great ideas, minus the attitude. (Score:1)
That's an erroneous assumption, since in effect, both GIF and JPEG are lossy. GIF loses color depth, which in many images is fatal, even with adaptive dithering, and JPEG loses color accuracy and detail and lotsa stuff. Sometimes JPEG is the better of the two undesirable alternatives, and PNG is impractical, such as in online publication of photos.
Re:mpeg2000 (Score:1)
Perhaps it's time the moderators started modding down cvillopillil [slashdot.org]/Steve Woston the troll.
Re:Fix needed for Patent law (Score:1)
Patents and copyrights have a limited lifespan (too long in some cases, but that's a topic for another time). Once they expire, people no longer need to worry about accidentally violating one.
Trademarks don't expire as long as they're defended. If they lasted forever, we would have a lawsuit mine field as people drag ancient, obscure trademarks out of their family history and sue.
I mean applying this to the JPEG compression schem (Score:1)
Re:JPEG2000 thoughts and questions (Score:1)
that is, the e.e. times piece states that *most*
(but possibly not all) of [the involved]
companies offer licensing at no cost.
does this include IBM for arithmetic coding
which seems integral to the standard?
(tom lane's independent JPEG group had to
yank arithmetic coding because of IBM)?
and where has AT&T, crucial contributor
to wavelet theory, disclaimed their rights,
especially after selling wavelet-based DJVU
to lizardtech, mentioned as a principal on
p. 204 in the "patent statement" in annex L
of fcd15444-1.pdf at the JP2K site?
this annex, part of the official standard,
does not disclaim for-profit licensing rights!
clearer statements from the standards body
going beyond the mere requirement that licensing
need only be "non-discriminatory" are needed
to interest mavens of open software.
BUSS (Big Ugly Slashdot Sigs) (Score:1)
Why? There's already the user option not to see any signatures at all, which is the preferable choice in all cases.
Re:mpeg2000 (Score:1)
Any justification for this? The real Steve Woston is certainly not a troll. And no, I'm not the Steve Woston troll. I say the Steve Woston troll, because the real Steve Woston is not a troll. He is quite frankly embarrassed and annoyed at being impersonated by the Steve Woston troll. You can read his thoughts on the matter here [mnc.co.za]
Gifs!?! (Score:2)
<td valign="TOP"><img src="./images/titles/j2klinks.gif"><br>
Re:PNG or JPEG2K - which to use? (Score:1)
I think it's more PNG v GIF than PNG v JPEG. And PNG wins the battle against GIF hands down: it's a superior format, with more features, and doesn't involve Unisys. But it is possible that PNGs could become the One True WWW Image Format. JPEGs and GIFs have evolved into a strange coexistence. GIFs are used for small graphics which require transparency or don't require great color, such as navigation widgets. JPEGs are used for pretty much everything else. But PNGs can do multi-level transparency, true color, greyscale, and indexed -- AND have nice compression.
Forgive my ignorance, but I haven't downloaded a Mozilla build in ages: how's the PNG support?
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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.
Re:Is this technology doomed? (Score:1)
Could be, or it's sleep deprivation.
Re:404 (Score:1)
Try it here [plinko.net]...
Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:2)
I agree - it is an improvement, just not a very large one. A reasonable question, in this day of 40G hard drives and fat-pipe DSL and cable modems, is whether we care about a 10% reduction in bandwidth for the same quality level.
uh ? (Score:1)
Talking of trolls, Zoyd....
Moderators, time to start moderating down the Zoyd troll [slashdot.org]. I don't know about most Slashdot readers, but I just can't believe that someone could still hold anti-feminist views that resemble the attitude of society in the 1800s in 2000.Not to mention that you seem to have an explosive temper and immediately cut into anything that you don't like without really examining the situation. Take this post apart and rant evilly about each line, perhaps it'll make you look more intelligent.
Who's the troll here, Zoyd?
ASP bites. Check out DIVX (Score:1)
Bah. ASP is crap. Have you seen any DivX encoded AVI movies? ~600 MB, 2 hours of video, approaching DVD quality (up to 720 x 480, 30 frames/second)
Here is a good link. [digital-digest.com]
IJG-like library available? (Score:2)
It was available before continuous-tone images were in everyday-use, so it was pretty stable at the time everyone needed good lossy image compression. And only the parts of the many JPEG variants were used that offered a) superior performance compared to other formats and b) were free to use (so, not arithmetic coding).
Do you know of any plans to create a similar library for JPEG2000?
Not (really) a patent problem (Score:1)
It's that it doesn't work.
That is to say, it doesn;t work usefully.
To explain: in order to get efficent compression, you need to use something called an IFS (Iterated Function System). These can be used to represent an image, but only if the IFS used is sufficently "similar" to the target image. And there in lies the problem. IFS's are good for generating natural looking images, but generating an IFS from an image is an inverse process. And has not been solved.
State of the are is to use the graduate student theorm to produce an IFS for your image, but this is expensive:
Take a gradutate student, give him a graphics workstation, lock him in a room, and don't let him out until he's come up with an IFS for your image.
This take 100 hours, of input from a grad student, in order to come up with an IFS. Not exactly mass market tech.
There was discovered a way (by one of said gradstudents) to automatically come up with an IFS that is "quite similar" to the image, called Partitioned Integreadted Function Systems (PIFS). Unfortunatle, they're not proper IFS, and the 10 000:1 compression went out of the window, and dropped to 50:1 or so. At 50:1 compression, with patent issues, and a slow algorithm, it just wasn't worth it.
Aside: The technology is patented under US patent 4,941,193. I'd link on IBM, but it's down. Partitioned IFS are US patent 5,065,447. More data in comp.compression FAQ here [faqs.org].
Re:PNG or JPEG2K - which to use? (Score:1)
Transparency is the reason (non-banner) GIFs are still around, IMHO. A well optimized JPEG doesn't have a much larger file size. Websites are addicted to the transparency feature in GIFs. Even Slashdot uses them. Posting that "Burn all GIFs" link was a bit hypocritical.
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Re:404 (Score:2)
(The_Messenger's Law: If they guy you stole it from can't remember who he stole it from, it must be under the BSD license.)
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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.
Re:Redundant again! Please reconsider your priorit (Score:1)
Re:PNG or JPEG2K - which to use? (Score:1)
You're forgiven :) Mozilla has full alpha channel support now, but the default is still sort of a kluge: instead of true color mixing, it uses random dithering to simulate transparency. This was done so that alpha would work on all platforms, including those that do not have native alpha compositiing, since Mozilla's architecture makes the necessary calculations difficult.
There is, however, a build option that compiles in support for native alpha compositing on some platforms--but I can't remember which platforms or which option.
There is more information available in the bug report [mozilla.org] in bugzilla [mozilla.org].
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Zardoz has spoken!
My take on jpeg2000 (Score:4)
If this technology is not free for free software implemenation, forever, then my advice is to avoid it like the plague. I hope they do release the technology for free, but even then some care is called for. After all, you definitely don't want to send a JPEG2000 image to a browser that doesn't properly support it. One can only hope that the browser support is better than that for, say PNG.
The idea of sending images at multiple resolutions, one for the screen and one for printing, is an excellent one. However, it's not fundamentally the responsibility of the image format, but rather of the hypertext protocol. The idea has been around for a while - the first time I saw it was in Ted Nelson's Xanadu proposal. Damn, the old guys stole all our best ideas! Again!
Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:1)
even a 10% reduction would be nice, expecially for those without fat pipes, or people using laptops or wireless internet access.
just my opinion, ignore as you see fit
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Of course IP issues would kill JPEG2000 (Score:3)
> companies and individuals who have not previously declared
> IP come forward and want royalties, will the standard be hurt?
Of course the standard would be hurt; in fact, I dare wager it would die. There simply isn't any place in the crowded market for any more IP-laden so-called "standards." Quite frankly, the existing JPEG format is good enough for most Internet images requiring 16 bit color, and for high-quality lossless images nothing beats PNG. I seriously doubt that the JP2K (needs shortening) standard will use less disk space/bandwidth than PNG, and it definitely won't create better quality since PNG is essentially lossless in the first place. JP2K decoding will also be more hardware-intensive than PNG, meaning it will be entirely inadequate for low-powered cellphones/PDAs/other portable appliances, which negates the benefits of being able to encode once for streaming from different bandwidths.
Another advantage of PNG which most people don't realize is that by reducing the color palette of low-res web graphics to 256, the same palette of GIF, you get a file which typically can be only 25-75% of the size of the same file saved as GIF. But that's a non-issue since the GIF patent is running out soon, and most people never get shaken down now as it is.
In other words, there's really no need for JP2K. Since PNG hasn't been picked up very well outside of Japan, where it is a fairly common format (just go to a japan.binaries.* anime newsgroup to see some...iluminating...examples), look for 1 of 2 things to happen to JP2K if it is indeed royalty-free: either it will be incorporated into new Web browsers and image viewers by default since it's heralded as the JPEG for the new millenium, and slowly take over with old JPEGs still dominating for a couple of years, or no one will care and continue to use JPEGS since they're easier and more standardized. If however someone pushes IP claims and the new standard is tainted with charges, look for no one to ever, ever, ever use it except for Adobe Photoshop and its clones; it will never come into general usage. Look at how common the similar LuraWave Format is, after all: not common at all.
Fact is, there's no need at all for JP2K. Wavelet compression has a coolness factor for geeks, but it's essentially useless. As I said, JPEG and GIF are already at the "sweet spots" for bandwidth/features, especially with the GIF patent issue ending soon. PNG with a reduced palette would be ideal for a lower-bandwidth GIF replacement if only it'd be heralded as a standard and PNG support were made almost universal, and for high-res images PNG is already perfect, lossless, beautiful. There's just no need at all for JP2K, and it would have been much better for everyone if the standards group had just endorsed PNG and the options of reduced-palette variants instead of uselessly inventing a new and IP-complicated standard.
> Is there a place for a part-2 which contains IP which is not free?
Yes: in a musty corner of a Photoshop dialogue box, where it will stay and not bother the rest of us.
> And, what applications does the community here see as being crucial
> for the adoption of JPEG2000?
The more important question is: How can the JP2K group convince people that there's a need for a new standard to replace 2 that are working just fine for general Net use, and 1 more which is perfect for high-res graphics and can also create smaller-sized GIF replacements when the palette is reduced in your image editor. We should just ignore JP2K and hope it goes away, since it's a resource-hog which doesn't make a better JPEG than JPEG, a better GIF than GIF, or a better PNG than PNG. But we should quietly implement it in Mozilla and Gimp and whatever else, just in case, as long as it's free.
Re:Of course IP issues would kill JPEG2000 (Score:2)
As to the fact that the standard will be hurt by IP inclusion. DAMN RIGHT it will be hurt. The fact itself that somebody should discuss and decide whether to adopt it is detrimental to the standard, because it removes attention from the proposed standard's important part (its features) in favor of giving it to "political" considerations.
This isn't to say that IP-parts shouldn't be allowed. It's just that they must be add-ons, not required to encode, view or maniipulate the stored data. But they could be useful (in some kind of tagged format) to allow specific additions to the image format, such as tags, layers, or whatever. Think of it kind of the kodak-photocd format: you have the image, and then you have extra info about it.
This said, I only have a cursory knowledge of JP2K, so what I'm suggesting might already be there.
Do we care? (Score:2)
However, waiting interminably for pages to download seems to me to be more a problem of bad Web design than inadequate compression. For one, it's very common to see images out there that could be compressed a lot more than they are. For example, when images have sharp chroma boundaries, a lot of people crank up the quality setting to the max to try to compensate for JPEG's well known chroma bleeding problems. However, with good software (like the Gimp) in skilled hands, you can adjust the chroma subsampling to 1:1, which will give excellent results at low Q, ie a better tradeoff.
JPEG works pretty damn well. JPEG2000 is better. But I am not yet convinced that the advantages are really worth the pain of upgrading to a new format, especially if it's not free as JPEG baseline is. If you really care about compression, there's plenty you can do using existing tools.
If they want it to take off.. (Score:1)
As formats get more features and capabilities they get more complex. I don't think JPEG would be worth implementing on my own since the amount of time it would take me to code the thing wouldn't be worth the benefits that JPEG2000 has over Standard JPEG or PNG (both of which have freely available implementations)
Would you give Steve Case root on your box? (Score:2)
A lot of people want Apple to release a QT player for Unix. Ha! I wouldn't touch the damn thing. There's no way I'll ever put an Apple software on my Unix machines after that mess! (The Windows machine wasn't important. I'm glad I discovered the evil there first.)
Would you give Steve Case root on your box? I don't think so.
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Re:Protection from being coopted? (Score:2)
I'm sure the answer is simple: Nothing. Last time around, the JPEG group didn't define a file format, they defined a syntax for sending compressed image data. Later, people outside the JPEG group cobbled together JFIF (JPEG File Interchange Format) so that JPEG compressed streams could be encapsulated in files and shared.
What this implies is that the JPEG group isn't interested in designing file formats, it's interested in specifying the compression techniques for the data itself. The metadata (image dimensions, compression parameters, color space information, etc.) are not covered by the standard.
Elsewhere in the posts here, I saw some people mentioning metadata being specified by JPEG2K, which would imply that they're taking a step beyond specifying the compression techiniques and are also specifying the stuff that goes around them. However, if they're like alot of other standards, the compression bits will be considered "Normative" and part of the baseline standard, and the metadata bits will be considered "Informative" and in one of the Annexes (read: optional).
It only makes sense. If I have a digital still camera with a number of fixed image parameters and limited capacity, I might want to store my image data in JPEG2K format but omit most of the metadata (since it's redundant across all of my images). No problem. And it's still JPEG2K.
And that's the point. The standards committee compares only about compressing/decompressing the images -- they're not interested in how the images are communicated in a particular application. (At least, that was their attitude last time around.) Anyone have any hard info to the contrary?
--Joe--
Fix needed for Patent law (Score:3)
What would be fair is to have a set period for public commentary during which IP holders would have to declare their intent to enforce their rights, or forever hold their peace. But the situation we have now seems tailor-made to encourage immoral-but-legal submarining like Unisys did with GIF.
It's beyond me why failure to defend one's IP claims in a timely manner doesn't have the same weakening effect on patents as it does on trademarks.
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Re:Of course IP issues would kill JPEG2000 (Score:2)
Vast amounts of things out there that work are hacks. Sure it's a hack. Animation is a hack, too, but it's extremely popular. Sure, it's inefficient, but people often don't care about that if it gives them what they want.
As for meeting the standard, in the GIF89A [ipal.org] standard, there is a clause that reads "A Local Color Table is always associated with the graphic that immediately follows it". The rotating pallettes which were popular back when PCs had 256 color video, violated this part of the standard because they were applying the local color table to image blocks that had been previously rendered. Were you complaining about that back then?
I use NON-compressed GIF now to avoid the licensing issues. PNG doesn't work on my browser because no one implemented a plug-in for it (Netscape 3) for Linux to support PNG in-line. Netscape 4 was way too buggy (and still is at 4.72 even though there is finally PNG support) to even use. Maybe ... maybe ... Mozilla/Netscape 6 will change that. It remains to be seen (i.e. hasn't, yet).
Sadly, PNG was a great idea gone bad because it just wasn't promoted well enough. That, and the lack of animation in the original version, effectively killed it.
just to clarify (Score:1)
Wavelet compression has a coolness factor for geeks, but it's essentially useless.
That's what I was replying to when I mentioned audio as another application. Don't accuse me of being annoying when you don't clarify your own points.
Second, PNG is great if you want lossless compression. I don't dispute that. However, bandwidth is sometimes a concern, in which case you may use lossy compression. If jpg and a wavelet format were equally supported by Netscape/IE, then I would generally lean towards a wavelet format for high-compression images.
Finally, I was also unclear when I mentioned resizing. I should've separated this into two things: rescaling (which you covered), and changing the aspect ratio. High-compression jpg images do not handle aspect ratio changes very well at all. Wavelet-compressed images DO handle these, though.
Granted, in a perfect world, we would all have access to original images in their uncompressed format before trying to modify them. And usually that is the case. But once in awhile you may have to deal with less than optimal conditions. That's all I was trying to point out.
SEAL
Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:1)
The JPEG encoder sucks. The test image was dithered - not a good candidate for JPEG encoding, *especially* with their crappy encoder.
JPEG2K may perform well with text, but it will never perform as well as PNG or GIF. That's because it's intended for photographs (hence the P in JPEG - "Joint Photographic Experts Group").
The fact is, the experiments described in the paper showed nothing.
-Dave Turner.
jpeg2k isn't that bad (Score:2)
Acronyms of Satan... (Score:3)
I sure am glad that the ITU-T and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG1 started as SC2. This allows for many more useless acronyms to spawn. Maybe the final group will be the JPEGJBIGITU-TISO/IECJTC1SC29WG1SC22/7 group. Did they translate their original group names from German?
Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:4)
Re:About patents? (Score:2)
JPEG (Score:1)
Re:What about Fractal Compression? (Score:2)
Fractal compression is very cool. It's sort of like a vector format, in a way...it has no inherent size. It can also achieve insane levels of compression. There was a small article on it several years ago in Scientific American [sciam.com], written (IIRC) by the inventor. The examples were very impressive.
Unfortunately, patents bite us on the butt once again. The format is patented by its creator, who runs an image software business (Iterated Systems [iterated.com]). I'm not sure when or if the patent will revert to the public domain, either, since it's a British patent and I know nothing about how Britain handles IP law.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Re:Of course IP issues would kill JPEG2000 (Score:1)
I agree with most of what you say, at least the part before the "Read the rest of this comment" link anyway. IP issues on JP2K would make it the next GIF. Who needs that again?
I'd like to add that the real reason PNG wasn't widely accepted as a replacement for GIF is that they didn't come out with an animated format quickly enough; so Internet Explorer supports PNG, but not MNG. Like it or not, advertisers want their animated GIFs.
Don't get me wrong, PNG is great, and I love it to death. It just wasn't timed right. If PNG/MNG had made it into the 3.0 rev of Netscape Navigator, GIF might be a quaint memory by now, which brings me back nicely to the original gentleman's question: IP issues will destroy any new still image standard on the web.
Re:some of this is plain wrong (Score:3)
> sizes compared to PNG, which is lossless as you point out. One of the reasons
> to use wavelet compressed images is for high compression.
Yes, you *do* get much smaller file sizes with Wavelet images than with PNG, depending on quality settings of course; but I'm afraid it's a case of me not being clear, rather than a mistake about the technology. What I meant to say in that sentence, and expressed poorly, is that I doubt an equivalently high-quality JP2K image would be at all smaller than the same image saved as a PNG, nor would an equivalently low-quality JP2K save much space over a regular JPEG. But I should have used the "Preview" button on that and caught my poor expression of the notion. My intent was to separate the high-quality from the low-quality uses of JP2K, and state that PNG is better for high-quality and JPEG is at least as useful for low- to medium-quality. There is absolutely no need to use a clunky hack of a file format to do the work of 2 other formate which are better suited to the task. It's like using a Swiss Army knife in place of a screwdriver and a pair of scissors--it'll do the job, but not as easily and comfortably as just having a screwdriver and a pair of scissors ready.
> Utter crap. Wavelet compressed images offer a couple benefits. They look better
> than standard jpgs if both are highly compressed
But as for the image quality of Wavelet compressed images, I have to respectfully disagree that they look better than existing formats. They re-scale to a larger size better, but that begs the question of why you aren't just using a larger JPEG in the first place. Remember the "clunky hack" comment I made above? Doubly so. Plus, re-scaling the images back upwards *does* result in loss of quality, just a different sort of loss from that found in regular JPEGS. You see, as you re-scale a Wavelet compressed image upwards, you lose detail information--the repeated color areas often start to look dull and not nearly as detailed. This is the opposite of JPEG images which, when re-scaled, show too many artifacts of the type of compression which was designed in the first place to preserve that detail. So, Wavelet compressed images once re-scaled lack detail, whereas JPEG gets some of the detail wrong when re-scaled due to compression artifacts. Before you get obnoxious again and say I'm full of crap, or whatever, the reason I *know* what I'm talking about is because I work with graphics files all the time, and often have to scale them up or down for various uses. I've also experimented with most of the availably formats, including the LuraWave Format (LWF) which is essentially very, very similar to JP2K. So don't get your panties in a bundle, I know what I'm talking about.
Which brings me to another point as to why JP2K is useless: after much experimenting, I came to the conclusion that the best way to store graphics for high-quality non-bandwidth-limited usage is PNG, plain and simple, there's nothing more useful and compact for the quality. For bandwidth or disk space limited uses, nothing is usually better than JPEG with the proper settings, especially for compatibility's sake; however, many times PNG would be a better answer in terms of both size and quality *if you reduce the palette* to between 256 and 5000 colors, depending on the image and the amount of colors you can take away before the average human eye even notices. Even on a big 32-bit screen, many images--even photographic ones--look better as PNGs with about 1000 colors than as JPEGS with 30+ thousand colors. One reason is the retention of detail with PNG, which is NOT present with Wavelet-compressed images. I repeat, make your images the right size before you save them in their finished formats, and no one will have to resize them later to either too-low-detail resized JP2Ks or too-artifected JPEG. And at any rate, PNG remains the best format in terms of ability to be resized well, even with lowered palette counts. So I repeat, *JP2K is USELESS.*
> Oh yeah, and aside from images, wavelet compression has uses in audio. Useless
> isn't a word I would describe it with.
Don't get all anooying.
Re:404 (Score:1)
Re:Protection from being coopted? (Score:2)
I don't know what they will do. I expect there are things they can do if they care. There are lots of patents on the algos used for JPEG2K. As far as I can tell holders had to allow free use in JPEG2K to get their algos considered. I doubt they gave up rights for non-JPEG2K uses. Which means legaly they could charge for the non-JPEG2K use. The same may be true for JPEG, you could probbably contact IBM and get them to charge Seattle Filmworks...
So software patents do have a minor good use (a few actually). Still IMHO outweighed by their destructave power.
Lossless *and* lossy? (Score:1)
Yes, PNG support is crappy, but wouldn't it be easier to improve PNG support than add JPEG2000 support? (And yes, Quicktime is evil)
More to the point, why is PNG support so pitiful? Maybe if it was defined by standard PNG/1105/ISO-6011-GRAF everyone would have stood up and taken more notice of it. Heck, maybe the responsible thing for the committee to do would be to endorse PNG as it's favoured lossless compression format...
Re:Lossless *and* lossy? (Score:1)
They did. There is an ISO/IEC spec in final draft:
FCD ISO/IEC 15948, Information Technology - Computer Graphics and image processing - Portable Network Graphics (PNG): Functional Specification
Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:2)
The benefit of JPEG2000 is not just the quality possible at low bit rates, but also the flexibility.
The benefits are mostly in the progressive download/compression vein, in that for each bit you download, your image becomes one bit clearer (to a point) so the same picture can be used by two people for different purposes.
For example, thumbnails can now be generated on the fly, instead of having two copies of the same image, just send the first X bytes to produce a thumbnail.
Nodecam (who can't remember his password, and doesn't seem to be able to check his mail
Re:My take on jpeg2000 (Score:1)
They (the JPEG2K members) can make it free for free software. They can make it free for comercial software. As far as I can tell, they have been working to make both true. They can not make it free forever. All they can do is make sure none of the member componies persue relivant patent "rights". There is know way they can be sure that some (3rd party) patent out there is relivent. There is even less way to know if some as-of-yet unfiled US patent is relivent.
I do hope they give it a new MIME type, and recomended filesystem extension. If they don't it will be a seriously unplesent transition.
I'll also be extreamly intrested in how long it takes to get adopted vs. how long it has been taking PNG (PNG support still appears to be improving in software, but I have seen few big web sites using it -- not even using any unplesent "IfBrowser" stuff). As far as I can tell JPEG2K has few features over JPEG then PNG did over GIF. I wonder if that will help or hurt. Regretably there are other factors and it will be hard to tell which are more important (PNG has a superset of GIFs still image features, but a subset of it's animation features, that is to say none of them; JPEG2K will have easier integration (assuming someone in the JPEG2K group will do the work) into Mozilla then PNG did into the closed-source Netscape; JPEG2K has comercial backing, PNG was a largely individual effort; JPEG2K is replacing an (effectivly) unencumbered format).
I beleve the reason JPEG2K adopts it as part of the image format is they can store the higest resoultion, and quickly convert that into a lower resoultion (or image subarea). That is a pretty cool feature, I don't know how useful it will be in practice, but it sounds cool.
Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:4)
Getting better compression ratios is not the only objective of the Jpeg2000 standard. It has lots and lots of other features that make it attractive besides impressive compression ratios.
First a little overview of compression. Compression schemes can be fitted into a three step framework:
Transform->Quantization->Entropy Code.
The transform part is where the data is massaged into something that is more suitable for compressing. The aims of this step is to remove redundant information as much as possible. In images pixels are very redundant. Pixels close together have very often the same color.
The transform part of the current Jpeg is the DCT transform.
The second step is quantization. This is where we throw away information that we can live without.
Finally comes Entropy coding. This is where the actual compression takes place. Common values in the data are here represented
by short bitstrings and those who occur seldom get longer bitstrings. In current Jpeg this is Huffman coding.
Raph talks about downsampling the image before compressing. That is exactly what Jpeg2000 does. The transform part of Jpeg2000 is a multiresolution analysis of the image. It takes the original image and downsamples it to a very small image. Then it adds in layers the information needed to upsample it to a higher resolution and get a perfect reconstruction. This is nice for lots of reasons. We can tell the decoder to stop downloading more details of the image at any time. You don't have to download the whole image if you don't want to. Nice for low bandwith connections and mobile connections. You can also choose to progress to a compleatly lossless version.
But Jpeg2000 does even more. It segments the image into tiles. This gives you the possibility to download only the regions of the image you are interested in in high resolution (good for porno - you only get the tits!).
The current Jpeg has only one transform, the DCT transform. Jpeg2000 v1 will have two transforms to choose between: An floating point transform for high performance compression and an integer only transform for use on low-end devices. That transform also allows you to get a perfect reconstruction. In Jpeg2000 v2 you can even specify your own transform coefficients and by that adapt the transform step to the data you have.
So even though the Jpeg2000 standard has rate/distortion similar to current Jpeg (that is Raphs point) it offers other very attractive features such as progressive decoding (giving you almost any resolution you want), regions of interest and the possibility to only get parts of the image if you are on low-bandwidth links.
Thanks
Hrafnkell
Obligitory Porn/Picture Post (Score:5)
.- CitizenC (User Info [slashdot.org])
JPEG2000 Comparison... (Score:5)
--Ben
Re:My question is... (Score:2)
"The key technology enabling such improvement involves switching from the sine waves used for the discrete cosine transform (DCT) of JPEG to wavelets. "
So yes it will.
Nate Custer
Re:A chance for mozilla to take the lead? (Score:2)
Re:Of course IP issues would kill JPEG2000 (Score:2)
If GIF succeeds where PNG fails, even though PNG is clearly superior (can we say VHS vs Betamax?), what would happen with True-Color GIF once the LZW patent expires?
some of this is plain wrong (Score:2)
I seriously doubt that the JP2K (needs shortening) standard will use less disk space/bandwidth than PNG, and it definitely won't create better quality since PNG is essentially lossless in the first place.
Wavelet image compression is lossy. Therefore you can get much smaller file sizes compared to PNG, which is lossless as you point out. One of the reasons to use wavelet compressed images is for high compression. Most of us don't crunch jpgs down too much because they end up looking like crap. Wavelet compressed images tend to retain their visual quality better.
Fact is, there's no need at all for JP2K. Wavelet compression has a coolness factor for geeks, but it's essentially useless.
Utter crap. Wavelet compressed images offer a couple benefits. They look better than standard jpgs if both are highly compressed. Also, the compression is not scale-dependent. FFT-based lossy compression has problems with this. In other words, if you compress a 320x200 image into a jpg, and then resize that image to different dimensions, image quality will suffer. It becomes more noticeable the more you compress. Wavelet based images don't suffer from this problem.
Oh yeah, and aside from images, wavelet compression has uses in audio. Useless isn't a word I would describe it with.
The IP issues, you hit the nail on the head. The only way to really break a new format / protocol / whatever into mainstream use is to make it freely available. Look at mp3. If Fraunhofer had clamped down on mp3 as soon as it became available, it probably wouldn't enjoy the popularity it has today. Of course now they are trying to bring home the bacon, but that's another story...
Best regards,
SEAL
Re:My question is... (Score:2)
--John
Designer's Article on JPEG 2K (Score:5)
If you don't want to read through specs and prefer a down-to-earth explanation of features etc, check this Designer article [designer.com] on JPEG2K and what it will mean to web design of future. Excellent stuff.
--
GroundAndPound.com [groundandpound.com] News and info for martial artists of all styles.
Is this technology doomed? (Score:4)
Will the MPAA try to kill this technology. This would be a techology that could be used to send images from a movie or even an entire movie over the internet. This technology must certainly violate the DMCA. In fact most technology violates the DMCA. Beware the MPAA is doing time travel experiments. They are going to send the DMCA back in time to stop digital images, then before that the VCR then before that photocopies, bethen photography, bethen paintings, bethen pigments, bethen scratches on rocks, bethen rocks, bethen matter.
The DMCA and the evil machinations of the MPAA must be stopped before they destroy all creation.
We must destroy the MPAA so that there is a future in which images can be communicated freely.
JPEG2000 thoughts and questions (Score:5)
Or... (Score:2)
Re:Another PNG? (Score:2)
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.