JPEG2000: Is It The Future Of Imaging?

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.

Redundant again! Please reconsider your priorities

We basicallycovered this all before [slashdot.org]. Not a whole lot new here!

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 /. too much to let it drift off course without saying something.
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Re:porn

When you zoom in (or print it - printers have more DPI than a monitor), more data could be downloaded to give you a clearer picture.

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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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.

Protection from being coopted?

I want to know what they're going to do to prevent people from making nearly-compatible files. Seattle Filmworks has a "special, proprietary" format which is really just JPEG with different headers, apparently; there's a program to convert them (sfwjpg), but they deny this, and want you to use special, crappy, Windows/Mac software.

I'd sure hope the new one has some kind of teeth designed to bite anyone trying crap like that.

My take on jpeg2000

Last time [slashdot.org] Slashdot covered this story, the EE Times article had a very hyped-up comparison showing JPEG2000 to be dramatically better than plain JPEG. Upon closer examination, while JPEG2000 is better, the difference is not very dramatic, as this comparison [levien.com] shows.

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!

Of course IP issues would kill JPEG2000

> My question to the group here is, if JPEG2000 takes off and
> 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.

Fix needed for Patent law

The comment in the article, warning about people holding IP crawling out of the woodwork if the standard is successful is definitely one to watch.

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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Acronyms of Satan...

"The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Joint Bi- Level Image experts Group (JBIG) are joint committees of the ITU (Telecommunications branch, ITU-T) and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG1. They have been meeting for over ten years, initially starting as a working group of SC2, responsible for character coding."

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...

We did a JPEG vs JPEG2000 comparison for a class project here [stanford.edu]. The improvement seems to be dramatic, especially at low bit rates.

Re:some of this is plain wrong

> 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.

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. :-) I wasn't talking about the type of compression, I was clearly talking about its application to image files. I repeat: *useless*. There are better tools for the job, and this is coming from someone who works with image files of different formats and uses intensely, day after day. JP2K is a bad hack, which attempts to replace other, better, tools.

Re:JPEG2000 Comparison...

Raph Leviens conclusions are interesting but they only tell half the story about Jpeg2000.

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

Besides such obvious applications as medical imaging, prepress or photo archives enabled by JPEG2000's lossless-compression feature (meaning no pixels are lost in compression), experts said that where JPEG2000 truly shines for mass market applications is in wireless applications.

Excuse me.. have we forgotten the MOST IMPORTANT application? Think of just how high the quality of porn will become! I won't have to leave my room for weeks! :)



.- CitizenC (User Info [slashdot.org])

JPEG2000 Comparison...

I recently found this: comparison [levien.com] of JPEG2000 to standard JPEG. The author, Raph Levien, was not too impressed.

--Ben

Designer's Article on JPEG 2K

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?

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

As a technical member of the JPEG2000 body, I have to say that sitting in and participating in the meetings was quite an interesting experience. As always, there were a number of technical issues to resolve, but the most heated and often most time was spent on IP issues. The comment in the article, warning about people holding IP crawling out of the woodwork if the standard is successful is definitely one to watch. While I have not been involved in the last couple of meetings, I'm still actively involved in following what has been happening technology wise. The benefit of wavelet compression is not so much in compression quality, but in features. From a file, one can get multiple resolutions, multiple quality levels, selective decoding of a specific region (random access), etc. This should be a benefit in the long run. The article touches on it briefly, but one down side to the new standard is that it is more resoure intensive than the current JPEG even PNG formats -- in memory and cpu power. I suspect it will be a while until we see wireless devices with the resources to handle the format in a general purpose manner. A custom ASIC solution is a possibility, but would a device like a Palm Pilot include one? What are the factors that lead to the improved quality and additional complexity? JPEG2000 is based upon wavelet compression. The standard allows for tiling images, but it is more typical that the whole image is compressed, for most applications. Unlike JPEG, where pixels are grouped into 8x8 blocks, wavelet schemes which operate upon the whole image have a lot more data to play with when it comes to throwing away (quantizing) information. If one were to attempt to use the standard with 8x8 tiles, well, it would not work very well. Because of this increase in data that is part of the working set, the amount of memory needed, when compared with JPEG is, in most cases, much greater. During the JPEG2000 process, a few companies proposed block-based wavelet solutions which would reduce this complexity without sacrificing feature set or even quality. However, they were not included due to concerns over the companies not making the IP available on a free and non-discriminatory basis. There has been a part-2 to JPEG2000 proposed that will allow for the inclusion of technologies which IP is not necessarily free. My question to the group here is, if JPEG2000 takes off and companies and individuals who have not previously declared IP come forward and want royalties, will the standard be hurt? Is there a place for a part-2 which contains IP which is not free? And, what applications does the community here see as being crucial for the adoption of JPEG2000? Good night and enjoy.. -jim