About JPEG 2000

JPEG 2000, named for the Joint Photographic Experts Group and the adoption year of the first part of the standard, was conceived as an effort to offer significant improvements over the first JPEG standard. In particular, the JPEG committee sought to create an open standard that provided better efficiency in image compression (including the option of “lossless” compression), the ability to bundle metadata with images in the same physical file, and storage of multiple resolutions of the same image in one file. The committee’s intention is for JPEG 2000 to replace JPEG as the prevalent standard for storing digital images across many industries and research fields. Although members of the library and archive communities were not explicitly involved with the creation of the new standard, the characteristics of JPEG 2000 files are of great interest to those professions. In fact, JPEG 2000 is not only an evolutionary progression of file formats but also a revolutionary step that can change best practices in ways that will sustain the use of digital imaging for access, preservation, and interchange