Flexible transmission of metadata in the JPEG 2000 Internet Protocol

The JPEG 2000 image compression algorithm and associated file formats create many new opportunities for sharing digital images. Through a highly scalable storage format, a JPEG 2000 image can be accessed at multiple resolutions and quality levels without first decompressing the entire image file and post-processing the data. The JPEG 2000 Internet Protocol (JPIP)-provides direct access to this scalability by allowing a client and server to negotiate for the delivery of only portions of the image file, as required by the client. In addition to progressively accessing the coded image data, JPIP allows for "progressive" access to the metadata contained in the file. Through the use of placeholders, the file format header and metadata can be progressively delivered to the client while still maintaining a link to the original file structure. In addition, JPIP allows for XML documents that have been embedded from the file to be searched using XPath. This paper discusses how these two technologies can be used to flexibly access the metadata in a JPEG 2000 file.