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 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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