A press release outlining Simon Cope's participation in the JPEG 2000 Symposium.

"Declaring an end to dictated formats and closed solutions that cause workflow inefficiencies and frustrate broadcasters and videographers, Thomson today announced the Infinity™ Series, a new line of next-generation acquisition, recording and storage devices that give broadcasters and videographers the power of choice — in recording media, formats, compression codecs,
and connectivity."

...

"As an additional choice of compression, the next-generation JPEG2000 codec is also included. JPEG 2000 offers special advantages over other compression codes: it offers higher-quality compression with better efficiency, delivers superb images without blocking artifacts at low bit rates, and, with its unique scalability, allows broadcasters ultimate flexibility by enabling them to encode a master file and then decode different resolutions as necessary."

"If you are involved in the development of games or any other program that displays images, the newest version of J2K-Codec will be a valuable addition to your software development kit. J2K-Codec is a software component that offers you the easiest way to add JPEG2000 support to application. ..."

"Pulse~LINK, Inc., developer of CWave(TM) Ultra Wideband (UWB) communications, and Analog Devices, Inc., a global leader in high-performance semiconductors for signal processing applications, have joined forces to demonstrate the industry's first wireless transmission of real-time High Definition video. The joint demonstration, featuring a side-by-side comparison of MPEG and JPEG2000 across Pulse-LINK's UWB wireless link, will take place at the DisplaySearch HDTV Conference, August 23-24, 2005, in Beverly Hills, CA.

From the press release:

LizardTech, a division of Celartem, Inc., and a leading provider of software solutions that make it significantly easier to manage and distribute digital content such as aerial photography, satellite imagery and scanned color documents, today announced the release of GeoExpress 5.0 SDK. This latest release of the SDK offers unlimited encoding capabilities to both MrSID and JPEG 2000 and exposes functionality contained in the GeoExpress 5.0 standalone product including JPEG 2000 encoding, NPJE/EPJE profiles, support for WKT-based spatial reference system metadata, and area of interest encoding of imagery to MrSID Generation 3 (MG3) as well as JPEG 2000.

"MainConcept, a worldwide leader in codec technology, has announced an aggressive new product roadmap. Together with the newly acquired Elecard team, MainConcept has been working for the past few months on a completely new codec lineup. The new message of MainConcept is "Every Codec. Every Platform." The goal is to offer all of the most-requested codec formats on all of the most-requested platforms."

From the press release:

QuVIS, Inc. has announced the first public exhibition of a successful decryption, decoding and playback of the DCI StEM JPEG2000 reference material at the upcoming Cinema Expo in Amsterdam RAI, June 28 through 30. This process was successfully demonstrated at the Digital Cinema Labs in Los Angeles, Calf., on June 17, 2005, reaching another milestone in the delivery of the next generation Digital Cinema systems.

QuVIS will display this content on a QuVIS Cinema Player, the third-generation QuVIS platform designed to track the emerging Digital Cinema Initiatives recommendations. QuVIS has announced availability of JPEG2000 as a low-cost option for the QuVIS Cinema Player in August 2005.

"ER Mapper has released the source code to its ECW JPEG 2000 Software Development Kit (SDK). The ECW JPEG 2000 SDK allows software developers to add support for large geospatial images in ECW and JPEG 2000 format to their applications. ER Mapper’s ECW image format is the industry standard for large (multi-terabyte) geospatial images." Plus commentary from Directions Magazine.

Common computers are morphing into powerful microscopes at UQ as the University trials virtual microscopes and unveils a plan to build a national repository of virtual veterinary slides.

Virtual microscopes, created by UQ's Schools of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) and Veterinary Science, are computers with special software that do the job of high-end laboratory microscopes.

Project leader and UQ Vet School senior lecturer Dr Paul Mills said virtual microscopes were accurate and users could zoom in or out, view depths of field, label their slides and rotate them like a three-dimensional image. ...

Press release from Xerox regarding Rob Buckley's tutorial address at the JPEG 2000 symposium.

Accom® today [April 14, 2005] announced at the National Association of Broadcasters convention, the launch of ProServ MX.8, the industry’s most versatile video production server. The ProServ MX.8 offers up to four high definition channels or up to eight standard definition channels. All channels offer symmetrical inputs and outputs. For complete versatility, ProServ MX.8 can simultaneously record, play, edit and manage HD and SD content.

ProServ MX.8 uses high-quality JPEG 2000 compression with user-selectable bit rates ranging from 25 to 200 Mb/s. To ensure frame accurate insert editing, I-Frame only compression is used.

Aware, Inc. has a demonstration server online with sample images from various collections. Contact Mike Serafino (+1-781-687-0336) for a username/password.

The University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center was awarded $40,000 by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation in December 2001 to clean and make accessible a series of hand-written but subsequently water-damaged cards produced by the poet Charles Olson during his effort to transcribe the marginalia in hundreds of books owned by Herman Melville. The renovated cards are scanned at a resolution of 600 DPI, then encoded into JP2 files and bundled with an Encoded Archival Description (EAD) XML box, TEI Lite XML box, and a PDF UUID box. Using Aware's toolkit, the images are delivered to the user's web browser through a server-side transformation to JPEGs.

If you are interested in the "Motion" side of JPEG 2000, the Digital Audiovisual Archiving blog. Sponsored by Media Matters LLC, a technical consultancy specializing in archival audio and video material, it focuses on the digital transformation and preservation of audiovisual material.

"GeoJasper is the FREE Geo supporting command line transcoder between JPEG2000 and other formats. i.e. Converts image data from one format to another correctly transferring Geo information between GeoTiff and GeoJp2™ (GeoJpeg2000). It supports striped as well as tiled TIFF images and TIFF images geo-referenced through World Files (TFW). Moreover it may combine three 1 band TIFFs into one RGB image. There are batch files supplied within the distribution to simplify command line execution.

"This software is FREE and Open Source... It's based on JasPer library and follows it's respective licence, which is totally free now! GeoJP2™ is a trademark of Mapping Science, Inc. The GeoJP2™ format is the intellectual property of Mapping Science, Inc."

There is also more information on GeoJP2 on the website.

intoPIX has designed hardware real time JPEG 2000 encoders & decoders that perfectly address Archiving applications. The JPEG 2000 encoders & decoders are simultaneous delivering high resolutions , high color depth (up to 16bits) and high data rates. Going up to Mathematically Lossless compression, it allows dealing with the best picture quality and even bit-to-bit image integrity for archiving applications.

The second conference on digital image archving by The Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) will be held in Washington DC on April 26-29. With tutorials on the 26th, the formal program runs for three days starting on the 27th with a format of a keynote speaker each morning followed by a single-track arrangement of technical papers or poster sessions through the day. There is a generous amount of time for making and reinforcing connections across a wide variety of disciplines; by way of example, the meeting is held with the cooperation of: AIC, ALCTS, CNI, DLF, DPC, ECPA, ISCC, MCN, OCLC, RLG, and SPIE.

From the website:

"What is it?
J2K-Codec is a software component, developed to facilitate JPEG2000 usage.
It can save you 8,000 lines of code, replacing them with a single line.

"Who should be interested?
J2K-Codec should interest virtually any person involved in the development of a program that works with graphics one way or another."

j2k is a free Photoshop and After Effects plug-in set for reading and writing the JPEG 2000 file format, the successor to JPEG.

Also known as JP2, JPEG 2000 uses wavelet compression as opposed to the DCT compression used in standard JPEG. The end result is better image quality in a smaller file. JP2 also includes mandatory metadata such as information about an image's color space.

The After Effects version has the ability to Auto Proxy, meaning that when working at half or quarter resolution, j2k will only need to read in a fraction of the file, resulting in dramatic speedups.

The JasPer Project is an open-source initiative to provide a free software-based reference implementation of the codec specified in the JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard (i.e., ISO/IEC 15444-1). This project was started as a collaborative effort between Image Power, Inc. and the University of British Columbia. Presently, the ongoing maintenance and development of the JasPer software is being coordinated by its principal author, Michael Adams

Aware, Inc. (NASDAQ:AWRE), a global provider of imaging and biometrics software, today [May 16, 2005] announced that it will demonstrate its comprehensive suite of biometrics software tools in its booth at the Electronic Passport Forum, held May 18-19, 2005 in Berlin, Germany. The software is designed specifically for e-passport enrollment, personalization, and reader systems, providing key functionality such as face and fingerprint image analysis and optimization, image compression, file formatting, and robust file transport. ...

Aware’s PreFace™ software performs facial image analysis and optimization to help ensure compliance with ISO/IEC biometric facial image standards. Aware’s ICAOPack™ provides several tools required for e-passport systems, such as software to read, write, edit, and validate biometric files according to the ICAO LDS e-passport standard and all relevant ISO/IEC biometric data interchange standards, including CBEFF. ICAOPack also includes JPEG2000 and JPEG for facial image compression, and WSQ for fingerprint image compression, as well as Aware’s QualityCheck software for fingerprint image quality scoring.

This is taken from an article in The Louisiana Library Network Newsletter (v13, n1, 2005).

LOUISiana Digital Library Update
by Pat Vince

How many times have you looked at an image in a digital library and wished you could zoom in for a closer look? Now LOUIS is offering the JPEG2000 Extension for CONTENTdm. The JPEG2000 Extension converts TIFF and JPEG files to JPEG2000 files during the import process to Acquisition Station. JPEG2000 allows maps, artworks, architectural drawings, paintings and other large image formats to be presented in a standard Web browser with a zoom and pan toolbar feature. Institutions benefit from using JPEG2000 by having more flexibility in selecting large format items for inclusion in the digital library. Users benefit from higher quality, detailed images without the delays of waiting for large images to be transmitted and without the need for downloading any special viewer. JPEG2000 items can be saved to “My Favorites,” in the LOUISiana Digital Library and used in slide shows to view and compare details among primary source materials.

From the press release:

Matrox Imaging today announced the Matrox Morphis for PC/104-Plus™, a capture board with a dual video decoder architecture and a real-time JPEG2000 compression/decompression engine. This board is the ideal video acquisition option for the Matrox 4Sight M, a highly integrated platform that is used to develop digital video recorders (DVRs) or network/web-enabled video servers for remote surveillance.

Part of Netpbm graphics conversion and manipulation package, jpeg2ktopam converts the named JPEG 2000 code stream file, or Standard Input if no file is named, to a PBM, PGM, PPM, or PAM file on Standard Output while pam2jpeg2k performs the opposing conversion.

"The JPEG-2000 specification specifies two different formats: JP2 and JPEG-2000 code stream (JPC). JP2 represents a visual image quite specifically, whereas JPC is a more or less arbitrary array of codes. JP2 images are a subset of JPC images. jpeg2ktopam converts any JPC image. If the color space identified in the image is grayscale (JAS_IMAGE_CS_GRAY), jpeg2ktopam generates a PGM image, unless the image contains only one bit per pixel, in which case jpeg2ktopam generates PBM. If the color space is RGB (JAS_IMAGE_CS_RGB), jpeg2ktopam generates a PPM image. If the input image is anything else, jpeg2ktopam generates a PAM image with no tuple type identified."

By Ian Gilmour of Media Matters. From the abstract: Motion-JPEG2000 lossless data reduction is implemented as a key technology for reducing file size in storage and for reducing data rates in networked file transfer.

An August 1, 2005 invitational meeting gathered about fifty archivists and technologists involved in the long term preservation of videos and films. The meeting, "Getting to Disk-based Lossless Digital Video Compression", was hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, itself much involved in moving image preservation.

Participants considered the potential of lossless, on-disk video storage in light of the "twilight of tape" as a cost-effective storage media. Other speakers reviewed current video metadata standards, and recent work in automatic extraction of metadata from video. The meeting included the first public demonstration of real-time, full-screen, mathematically-lossless video compression and decompression based on the Motion JPEG 2000 (MJ2) standard.

"What we have released is an archive of the HiRISE Experiment Data Records (EDRs) and Reduced Data Records (RDRs). EDRs are in the *.IMG file format and represent individual CCD channels (remember, there are 14 CCDs in the HiRISE camera and two channels per CCD, for a total of 28 channels). These EDRs are cleaned up, calibrated, stitched together, and mapped to Mars’ geometry, resulting in the RDR products. RDRs are in the *.JP2 and *.LBL formats. JPEG2000 is the technology that enables us to offer our gigantic images to the scientific community and the public in a timely and efficient manner. An observation’s image data are in the *.JP2 file and its meta data are in the detached *.LBL files. To view these products, JPEG2000 compatible software is required (see our site for a list of offerings)."