Just when you thought it was safe to use acronyms like TIFF, PDF and GIF, along comes a new one -- JP2.
Born out of work from the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), JP2 -- or Jpeg2000 -- is the hot new standard for taking digital imagery into the new millennium.
Jpeg2000 tempts end-users with the sweetness of features and functions that allow for increased image flexibility, decreased file sizes and greater scalability. With more and more operations going digital, the need for additional functionality is not only just desirable, it's real. Whether you're at a newspaper in the pre-press department or posting images to a web site, the benefits of a technology that improves photo editing workflow and makes images easier to transmit and store without sacrificing quality mean big improvements to your business and products.
But Jpeg2000 is not a technology itself; it's a technology standard that has been in development since 1996. The result of a collaboration of experts from major corporations and standards bodies from 18 countries, Part One of Jpeg2000 is now an International Standard of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Daniel Lee of Santa Clara, Calif.'s Yahoo! Inc., the chairman of the ISO working group (a.k.a. JPEG) noted, "The Jpeg2000 International Standard is the culmination of years of very hard work by [ISO] working group experts and signals that implementation can be expected shortly."
In his paper, "An Introduction to Jpeg2000 and Watermarking," Richard Clark, a veteran JPEG member, noted how JPEG began as a way to add small images to character-based computer terminals in the '70s and early '80s. But it rapidly became a confusing mix of features "in excess of 40 options, many of which were mutually exclusive, and some of which required costly licensing to avoid intellectual property rights constraints. Its potential for use across a much wider range of applications meant that the requirements were constantly changing, and the standard developed as a shopping list of compression components rather than as an integrated whole."
In an attempt to counter these problems over the last few years, the JPEG group extended the standard, added a file format (the Still Picture Interchange File Format, or Spiff), and even offered a new lossless standard, Jpeg-LS. Yet with a lukewarm response at best by the marketplace, the JPEG group moved on to compile all the needed features into Jpeg2000 -- a complement, not a replacement for the current JPEG.
But lest you be tempted to think differently, international standardization is no easy task. In order to avoid simultaneous development of similar technologies in different countries, international standardization helps trade efforts by eliminating technical barriers. The rigorous ISO standards process starts with an identified need in a particular area which is then formally approved by ISO and the rest of the work continues from there.
International standards are developed by ISO technical committees and sub-committees in a six-stage process that is governed by three main principles -- consensus-building, global solutions, and market-drive. The end result is a standard born from a formally recognized need that can satisfy both industries and customers worldwide, and is a voluntary effort because the international standardization has been driven by market needs.
The final version of the Jpeg2000 standard will actually include five main parts:
Part Five is reference software.
What does JPEG2000 mean to real people?
Most end-users only experience technical standards in specific products like Adobe Photoshop and Quark XPress (both of which are conversant with JPEG, TIFF, Pict, BMP, etc.), and while an understanding of the laborious international standardization process helps to validate a standard's components, it still boils down to the question of: what can it do for me?
The JPEG group intends to draw from its past experience and successes in its modeling of Jpeg2000. It's still intended to be free of software licensing and royalty fees and offers significant features like progressive resolution, better quality at high compression ratios, lossless and lossy compression in one system, better error handling in noisy transmission environments, region-of-interest coding, image protection and the inclusion of metadata and ICC profiles.
One of the largest improvements from JPEG to Jpeg2000 is the use of wavelet compression technology instead of discrete cosine transforms (DCT).
Wavelets are essentially math functions used to represent data. In this type of compression method, each wavelet represents more intricate information than cosine waves and becomes part of a final bit-stream composed of independent layers or bands.
This means that you can retain fewer waves, which translates to higher compression rates and thus smaller file sizes. So, more information can be held in less space -- a huge advantage in terms of image usage, transmission and storage.
With DCT, on the other hand, image data is stored in blocks, which are stored in numerical order and represent data from the top to the bottom of the image. The result is that slow drawing of large files in which you wait for the image to appear, often one line at a time, from the top down.
Wavelet compression allows for the progressive resolution of images. Each layer or band of image data is a representation of the entire image, but in varying degrees of resolution. So the image would initially be presented all at once, beginning with coarser resolution until the remaining bands fill the image to the desired resolution level.
One pioneer trying to utilize wavelet compression techniques of the Jpeg2000 standard into its products is LuraTech Inc., a German company with U.S. offices in Menlo Park, Calif. At ceBIT 2001, a world business fair to be held this month, the company will be presenting its implementation of Jpeg2000 in its latest product, LuraWave 3.0. According to a recent LuraTech press release, the company's "multi-resolution transmission model" creates the ability to download sharper versions of an image progressively.
LuraTech says that its software initially delivers a lower resolution version of the entire image and then more and more details are filled in as the data stream arrives. LuraWave enables individuals to control and define an image's compression rate and decompression quantity, as well as scale images to different sizes without having to create separate thumbnail files. This flexibility makes LuraWave suitable for image-intensive web sites, wireless devices, and high-quality graphics animation production."
Other features
In addition to providing for better quality at high compression rates and for progressive resolution, Jpeg2000 is also intended to allow imaging transmissions to go from lossy -- that is, data is thrown away in the compression process -- through lossless -- wherein no data is lost. The current JPEG standard uses lossy compression, so the original image can never be rebuilt exactly. Both lossy and lossless compression are handled in one stream with Jpeg2000, maximizing flexibility when working with images.
Annette Giaco, quality manager for Gannett Co. Inc. of Arlington, Va., travels amongst the company's 99 daily newspapers leading Photoshop training sessions, helping with color-control issues and grading each paper's image production quality on a regular basis and knows the importance of lossless compression for image workflow at her papers.
"As more and more entities go completely digital, Jpeg2000 should be very helpful," Giaco said. "Especially if it really is lossless, it will help the digital camera workflow and production processes. When you're shooting news, it's usually hard to properly light the scene, especially with digital cameras, which produce a lot of noise anyway. Then you end up creating artifacts on top of artifacting trying to fix it."
With lossless compression, Giaco said, all of the original images could instead be preserved and manipulated for maximum efficiencies.
The ability to go from lossy to lossless compression in one system sets Jpeg2000 apart. In lossless compression -- the type of data compression used in .zip or .sit files, also known as Lempl-Ziv-Welch or run-length encoding -- no data is lost, but storage space can only be reduced by about 50 percent. With lossy compression, some data is lost as the technology tries to eliminate redundant or unnecessary information.
Some estimates claim that with Jpeg2000 the image file can be reduced to as low as two percent of its original size.
"I'm very excited about it because it brings us much tighter compression and better quality," said John VanBeekum, newsroom systems editor for graphics at the Miami Herald.
"Even if the compressed file sizes were the same, higher quality is what we want and need in Jpegs," VanBeekum said. "As an example, we use Altamira's Genuine Fractals 2.0 as a tool on the photo desk to help increase quality on existing small image files and for an original scan when needed. But we would never save or archive an image for our image production flow or image archive in their native format."
With this increased amount of control over individual elements within image files, "region-of-interest" areas can also be identified. These areas are coded for better quality and placed at the beginning of the file's data stream. Upon presentation of the image, these areas get decompressed before the rest of the image. This feature could be particularly important in medical imaging to examine specific areas of a photo (not to mention news photos on a web site).
Similarly, multi-resolution decomposition capabilities provide for diverse image management options. As shown in tutorials by Charilaos Christopoulos (http://jj2000.epfl.ch/jj_tutorials), one of the JPEG contributors from Sweden's Ericcson, different types of resolution can represent images at the same presentation time, allowing different modes to be selected.
Scalability can also happen in reverse in that the image could be reworked beginning with a smaller corner image and reforming back to the original image size.
Error resilience is another important part of the Jpeg2000 standard. While transferring current JPEG files in noisy environments (busy or intermittent network connections, such as over cellular modems), images can suffer in quality, often dramatically, when bit errors occur.
Despite JPEG having restart intervals that try to recover from such hiccups, data is always lost in the process, usually the entire file.
John Iobst, vice president of newspaper operations and technical research for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) agreed that error resilience is one of the two greatest benefits Jpeg2000 has to offer. "Jpeg2000 has much better error handling. If something goes wrong with the transmission, you won't lose the whole file, just part of it, especially on-line where there's less predictability of transmission engines. The discrete cosine transformation [used in the current JPEG standard] is very unpredictable compared to the wavelength transforms."
Color management is another area in which Jpeg2000 takes great strides. It will handle different color spaces like red-green-blue (RGB) and cyan-magenta-yellow-black (Cmyk) and have the capacity to include ICC Profiles for documentation of color characteristics of input and output devices within each file.
Gannett's Giaco said, "This capability would override some work in the standard editing space, saving time."
Also, the current JPEG standard does not allow for images greater than 64-kilobyte-by-64-kilobyte, while Jpeg2000 allows for 256 components which can be affected.
And you'll be able to include other information within files to protect your images. Most photographers and graphic artists agree that the capability to encrypt information into a file is a big advantage and good protection against tampering. Information on copyrights, file ownership, usage parameters, limiting use of the image data at certain resolutions, and ensuring that an image has not been altered are all key metadata that provide those critical details about an image file.
Expectations of integration
All the exciting and much-desired features of Jpeg2000 make for plenty of industry banter from those following the standards development process, but when we will actually put this standard into practice at the user level is still unknown. Despite quiet internal prototype efforts, the general consensus seems to follow the concept of letting the market, or the customers, drive development needs.
Quark Inc., the Denver-based supplier of the ubiquitous XPress page-layout application, isn't offering any specifics on a timeline for getting one of its products to conform to the Jpeg2000 standard.
Glen Turpin, Quark's communications manager said, "We listen first to a potential solution identified by our customers and then second, we make sure our customers are interested in that solution."
With minimal expectations of seeing Jpeg2000 implemented to its fullest capabilities immediately, Gannett's Giaco prefers the conservative approach before getting excited by features promised by a new standard. She added, "I really believe that less is more, and we're much better off thinking that. I have found it takes almost a shakedown period of time before using it [new standards] in product releases."
Miami's VanBeekum feels that the ball is in the court of suppliers who will need to include it in their software with no additional costs to customers. "For the photojournalism community to accept Jpeg2000, first Photoshop will need to recognize Jpeg2000 as a valid format for opening and saving files. Next hurdles would be for the major camera makers to begin using it in their digital cameras and digital camera software, and for layout software makers -- Quark and [Adobe, with its InDesign application] -- to include import filters. The smaller suppliers -- image compression and cleaners, archives, etc. -- will follow their lead. All of the above has to happen at no extra cost or installation beyond basic program installations."
In terms of integrating products that use new standards like this at his 332,000-curculation paper, he said, "The threshold for acceptance at the Miami Herald is when photographers can work in the field or in extreme circumstances without getting burned by having a file which can't be opened."
With 24 years at NAA and its predecessor organizations, Iobst feels implementation of the Jpeg2000 standard will be an entrepreneurial process, in the same way many other standards are finally adopted. "The people who are desperate will write their own Photoshop plug-in, and then as it cycles through, all others that support the capability to read JPEG will have to support JP2. The same is true for browsers, which are always going to be a problem. One issue that will have to be addressed in the software will be going from a JP2 back to a JPEG, and then re-compressing the file -- that would be very ugly indeed."
But ugly doesn't seem to be the direction in which this new standard is headed. Benefits of Jpeg2000 features could touch the entire business. From the implementation of region of interest coding and better image storage capabilities to timesavings and higher quality, Jpeg2000 tempts meager end-users with sweet promises. As the international standardization processes move along, the next step is to start integrating the standard into prototypes of actual products that can actually be used.
-- Lisa Wagner, wagner@colepapers.net
LuraTech Inc.,
(650) 326-8829,
e-mail: info@luratech.com.
