JPEG 2000: Worth the wait?

The seeds of JPEG 2000 were planted at a meeting of the JPEG committee (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 WG1) in 1995. The eventual standard should provide new ways to deal with images in compressed format Although the "requirements" for the current standard are extensive, essentially the standard will allow an image to be compressed once (losslessly if desired) and different sub-bitstreams extracted to meet the requirements of the application (monochrome, reduced resolution, region of interest progressive display, even transmission over error prone channels). Unfortunately, this "work item" will not become a full fledged international Standard until at least 2001. This paper discusses the history of JPEG 2000, the technologies in the current verification model (color and wavelet transforms, context models, entropy coder, quantization techniques, region of interest error resilience) and how these technologies work together to achieve features desired in a modern compression system A status report for current SPEG committee activities and schedule is included.