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JPEG2000: Is It The Future Of Imaging?
LISNews writes: "EE Times has a cool story on the pending JPEG2000 standard and how it will change what we see on the Web. They are already thinking wireless: 'The killer app for JPEG2000 is a handheld device combining both Internet applications and wireless access.'" They're also thinking about migration from current formats, smooth degradeability and -- nice to hear -- Open Source acceptance. Try JPEG's own JPEG2000 page for more information and links.
Note non-image data not equal viruses It will have descriptive information etc it will not have VBS scripting or javascript or macros or whathaveyou Might as well create a text file virus
ALL NON ALPHABETIC CHARACTERS DELETED DUE TO STUPID NON FUNCTIONAL ASCII ART FILTER. FIX THAT DAMN THING WILL YOU
We basicallycovered this all before. Not a whole lot new here!
/. too much to let it drift off course without saying something.
Good lord, I'm really getting tired of this! If you guys can't read and remember your own front page (as you've admitted you don't) then it means that you (as individuals) aren't picking topics that you (as a group) find essential reading -- and that's a terrible sign!
There's so much interesting stuff going on, but they seem to find the same old stories over and over, perhaps 1/3 of the accepted stories are retreads. CmdrTaco et al -- we love you, but maybe it's time to go to a community moderated article selection with occassional "automatically accepted" posts by you guys.
if you can't remember or even do a search on old topics when picking a new one, you are too overloaded to be doing a good job at the task of selecting topics.
There are so many other areas where we'd rather have you guys using your impressive talents!
At the very least, can we see a quarterly thread to select the "best-of" suggestions for improving SlashDot, the way we select questions for interviews? Call it a step towards RMS's view of community-based Open source, if you will, but repeats and other bad thread decisions serve no one, and I like
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If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.
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I like to watch.
ok the highest images quality differences are only 10% but it's the possibilty of different degrees of compression of the same images at runtime that makes it interesting
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't know where Chew and Choo got their encoder...
The JPEG encoder was based on a direct implementation of the DCT.
Further, 2/3s of the images they looked at were outside of JPEG territory. They were sharp-edged patterns, or text. That's what GIFs are for!
That's the conventional wisdom, but JPEG2K apparently does perform well with text. In any case, it's part of the experimental process to compare the performance with different classes of images.
I wonder if Chew and Choo were "expected" to get certain results...
Not at all.
It wasn't my signature at all (which is non-existent). I'm not sure if it objected to the use of the not-equal sign, or the presence of the quotation mark next to the period or something, but it thought I was gettin' jiggy with some ascii art, which I most certainly was not.
I think it was the server(s) getting high on some of Hemos's $3 crack.
now if only we could get people to adopt a standard of total filesize... instead of, "use big image, it's good, painful for modem user, and helps site in no way!". just bitter....
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
(sorry to reply to this thread again,but)
I took a look at Raph Levien's results, and tried to understand how such good results were obtained with JPEG. I think I understand now: the process of smoothing (I assume that the GIMP smooths before downsampling to reduce aliasing) then downsampling, then compressing is actually similar to the wavelet approach (read my description of wavelet compression posted earlier), except that wavelets allow of more levels of hierarchy, and different types of wavelet filters can be applied.
If anything, Raph Levien's results are a validation of the wavelet/JPEG2K approach to image compression.
Raph's comparisons seems entirely subjective. Comparing such highly compressed images, all blown up, isn't necessarily a fair technique. Try standing back from the monitor a bit (or downsampling the image size) and the results may change. The JPEG 2000 image looks a LOT better than the JPEG under these circumstances (IMO), as the smearing out of error helps, while the softening of hard lines is less noticeable.
Real error image analysis (using l2-norm, or perceptually based models) can be used to give a better "picture" of the type of improvements that JPEG 2000 offers.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Well, MPEG-4 is just about ready to be published, I believe.
It is markedly different from MPEG-2.
Did he try JPEG2000 encoding the downsampled version the same way he did with normal JPEG? I'd like to see how such a comparison favored.
JPEG2000 might not be too great an improvement, but it looks to be an improvement nonetheless.
Worth a read if you've a web designer etc...
Has anyone noticed that the /. clock is wrong? As I post this, it is 1:33am on the East coast...mark.
Mycroft-X
Having read the graphic artist's 'Why this matters' it all comes down to this:
It is highly likely that JPEG2K will be included in Netscape, IE and Opera browsers. JPEG2K allows one to set (at the user level) how much compression one needs, and allow one to have different ratios for print downloads and viewing downloads - for example, when printing, I might want 300 to 600 dpi, but while viewing, 90 dpi might be fine for me.
All that said, apparently PNG is still better. But will it be included in IE, Netscape/Mozilla and Opera? OK, one down. But implementations are still not good.
All in all, a better method than JPEG in actual use would be JPEG2K, and it's a good bet it will be available for all browsers, whereas PNG is still hobbled a bit. And much more Open Source!
Will in Seattle
Yeah, but unless you laminate the paper right after printing, it doesn't clean as easily as a monitor. Yet another reason the why WWW has made the printed pr0n industry obsolete. Thanks anyway.
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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.
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I like to watch.
Hey, good job, cool guy. I think you're lost. This is a discussion of a STILL-PICTURE format. Although you could, I guess, do a massive animated-GIF-style slideshow of a zillion JPEG2000s, I think a video format like MPEG might be a little more convenient. But thanks for the anti-DMCA and -MPAA vitriol. 'Cause we need free thinkers like you.
Disclaimer: I hate the DMCA and the MPAA, too. I just thought this guy was a little off-topic.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Yes, and so do water-based lubricants, ADSL, 40GB disks, and Kleenex.
I'm wondering how long it will take for our wonderful GPLed graphics apps to support this. Like The GIMP and pornviewer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HElectric Eyes.
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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.
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I like to watch.
Ever hear of MJPEG, the motion jpeg format? Does just that...
Loki uses it for some of their game videos...
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Uses for JPEG 2000:
An automatic, thumbnailing Usenet binary decoder. Something that grabs the first x bytes of an image, and produces a thumbnail of x quality.
For wireless access devices without sufficient CPU/RAM to decode the images themselves, as a proxy filter. As the display is of highly limited resolution, it's silly to send huge images across such an expensive link. While it's currently possible (see freshmeat.net) to obtain image downsampling and/or quality reduction in a proxy, it amounts to much wasted bandwidth as bits are literally tossed away at the proxy. JPEG 2000 (that name must die) would alleviate the bandwidth crunch at the head end, by requiring the proxy to only aquire a small portion of the original image to possibly resample and transmit via whatever proprietary means to the wireless web browser.
Stock photography CD-ROMs (and websites) would benefit from the format, as well. Even with really-fast CD-ROM drives, PhotoCDs are expensive (time-wise) to preview and select from. Thumbnails could instead be generated arbitrarily, and on the fly. This also eliminates the tangle of often-nasty software (or inherently inefficient HTML) that often accompanies digital stock photography.
Once in awhile, standards are good. Particularly the openly-adoptable sort. Before GIF, we had PCX, a slew of more-proprietary formats, and very few images being shared. After GIF, anyone could get images from anyone else, and there was much rejoicing (and sending about of pictures and graphs and data and...).
Then, along came JPEG. It took some time to be adopted, namely because of people viewing them with fixed 8-bit palettes under Windows. I recall many a flamewar in the BBS age about this topic. The Windows folk didn't like the way JPEGs looked, all grainy and ugly and, well, dithered. In the other corner, I had a Diamond Speedstar 24x, displaying 24-bit color in cshow under MS-DOS, and there simply was no comparison.
Eventually, mass market display technology grew up a bit, and more people were able to see thousands of colors at once instead of 256. At exactly the same time as this was happening, GIFs began to fall by the wayside, and JPEG grew to become king of the interchange formats.
A couple of years after that, The Powers That Be at Unisys struck down with great fury and vengeance, which more-or-less signed the death certificate for GIFs in common historical usage, though GIF web-button-diddies persist.
At this point, there were two competing formats on the web, both with drastically different claims to fame. GIFs are big, but lossless, transparent, animated, and patented. JPEGs are small and have more colors, but are lossy, opaque, static, and free.
Realizing that something must be done, the Something Must Be Done crowd chimed in and proposed PNG, the bastard sibling of GIF. Alpha channel blending, progressive display, 24-bit lossless color, and patent free. All good, all fine, except nobody cares about lossless compression in web pages (save screenshots, drawings) or porn.
Thus, years later, PNG is 'out there.' It's not in widespread use because the files are too large, and it doesn't offer any compelling improvements in bandwidth- or storage-limited enviroments (and no, the available alpha channel doesn't make up for that in everyday use). Besides, a number of browsers *still in common use* just don't support PNG, and never will. (WebExplorer, anyone?)
Reducing the palette size of a PNG file is silly, too. It amounts to lossy compression of a particularly nasty sort. I don't know about you, but I can *see* the difference between 16- and 24-bit color on most images (web page graphics and other cartoons excluded, of course). A photograph of a sunset should have a smooth gradient from baby blue sky to the angry red of the sun (or whatever colors it is that evening), not something that has defined color regions like a paint-by-number.
Eight years ago, I picked up a SoundBlaster 1.5. Back then, sound files of even the 11KHz mono 8-bit format recorded by the SoundBlaster were considered huge. Creative Lab's answer? The VOC format, which allowed truncation of the files down to 6, 4, or 2 bits per sample. Viola! Small files, and shitty quality.
In another historical (or current, depending on how long you've been around) example, MPEG (and other perceptual) encoding of audio was shown to be dramatically better than truncation. I'll spare the details here since everyone here knows them, but time and time again, perceptual encoding (irrespective of medium or technique) has been shown to be superior to truncation or throwing away of data.
And before anyone says "But, PNG is *dithered* down to a reduced color depth, which makes it OK," I'll have to disagree. Sony has a dithering process by which they record sound at 20 bits per sample, and reduce it to 16 for use in CD players. The remaining 4 bits are dithered into the LSB, which does allow some percieved hearing of sounds below the normal threshhold of a CD. Does this make 20-bit digital audio come out of an off-the-shelf CD player? No. Is it a little better than normal 16-bit PCM? Probably. Is it better than a hypothetical 20-bit MPEG stream at the same bitrate (172kBps)? Fuck no. And in the specific case of dithering a digitized visual image, it is almost always blatantly obvious that dithering has been applied. Have you ever tried to scale a dithered image, or print one using halftones? Ever see what the current crop of so-so monitors does to a dithered image (can we say Moire patterns, boys and girls)? etc. etc.
Simply because JPEG 2000 does all of the things that PNG does, and all of the things JPEG does, does not make it unuseful. It should show to offer substantially improved usability over either format. Whether or not one considers this usability to be important or not is dictated by the limitations of that person's creativity.
Kid-proof tablet..
I hear MS is planning an extenstion to the jpeg format specifically for faster web browsing - works only with IE so far. It also has header data encrypted, with keys furnished by content providers to allow or disallow viewing of selected images for different certificates.
Anybody got the scoop on this one? I hear the MS extension is supposed to be 50% faster and result in 50% less data loss at all levels of compression. If so, looks like it may become the defacto standard, just like IE is the "standard" web browser for those desiring access to the latest technological innovations.
You are perpetuating serious nonsense yourself. There is nothing wrong with ASF, but there are *stupid* pirate groups everywhere who have no sense of how to use it. Most ASF's were made from already-bad MPEG-1 files (that's two lossy compressions in a row!), and with a complete inability to adjust software settings. While the MPEG-1's were 1/4th of NTSC/PAL resolution, the idiots recompressed them to a laughably low resolution of 320x200, stripped the framerate from the original 29.97/25 to 15, and generally messed everything else up as well. Oh, and they forgot to check that little box that says "click here for better quality!! do it! do it now!1 damn!!"
;-)" releases from DVD rips. Only God knows why it's called that, because it has nothing to do with the recently-deceased divx "pay-per-view DVD" format. DivXes are gaining lots of acceptance, because it's essentially the same technology as MPEG-4 ASF's, but with a brand new name!
There have been a few good ASF releases, but nowadays they're making "DivX
would this make porn download faster?? i hope so....
Rock 'n Roll, Not Pop 'n Soul
Rock 'n Roll, Not Pop 'n Soul
carldrawings.dk3.com
MPEG 4 == QuickTime
Will I retire or break 10K?
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I websurfed, weak and weary,
...Over many a strange and spurious website of 'hot chicks galore',
...While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
...And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour.
..."'Tis not possible," I muttered, "give me back my cheap hardcore!" -
Quoth the server, "404".
thats another lib they gotta add to SDL, and another update for mozilla, and dare i say IE. I hope the documentation is good.
jpeg200 is fine, but I am waiting for mpeg200. Or how about music compression based on wavelets instead of fft (although I have nothing against fft -- Fourier was a great guy :^) Could we soon have napster type sights trading copies of The Matrix? It will be intersting to see what happens in the future.
Current Web Browsers don't even support PNG properly, much less MNG. For christs sake, animated GIFs are still the only way to put animation on a web page without plugins. This is innovation and progress?
in this web-based world, JPEG2000 offers nothing to the end user until their browser supports it, and supports it properly.
So i won't be holding my breath, and frankly, couldn't be much more apathetic about the adoption of wavelet compression, which was invented frickin years ago.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
If this really is a "clean" spec, then it looks like this could be an oportunity for Mozilla to take the lead in image processing. It better be squeeky clean or else, in 5 years, we'll end up right back into the same GIF/PNG debate of today.
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Still pictures must be invented before animated pictures. Perhaps I am pre-topic instead of off topic.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Does anyone know whether the this JPEG 2000 standard is covered by any patent? It would be really bad for OSS (and others in general) to have another GIF.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Maybe I have had too many temporal anomalies. I'm post-topic.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I want to know what they're going to do to prevent people from making nearly-compatible files. Seattle Filmworks has a "special, proprietary" format which is really just JPEG with different headers, apparently; there's a program to convert them (sfwjpg), but they deny this, and want you to use special, crappy, Windows/Mac software.
I'd sure hope the new one has some kind of teeth designed to bite anyone trying crap like that.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I must admit that I haven't read much of the technical specs. But I don't think that I want to. After reading the EE Times article, this seems like a marketing-driven technology.
This article went on about how this fits in with XML and wireless, handheld Internet access.
Who gives a shit? The question remains: is it a *better* format? Any fool can stuff GIFs or BMPs into a tiny format that will display on crappy screens. Unless they're planning on inventing millions-of-colour Palm screens, that's not so useful. XML? C'mon, that's a tacked-on technology, and they know it.
Looks like the Joint Picture Experts Group consists of a lot of people that decided they wanted to hop on the year's bandwagon. If this was JPEG1997, they would have said that it's perfect for use in 'push.' If in were JPEG1999, we'd be told that it's fully compatible with voice technology to be able to audibly view images through a phone.
God knows what JPEG2001 one will involve. They'll probably tout it as being "fully Linux-integrated."
-Waldo
I think rather that the MPAA will use this format. JPEG2000 allows for a 'MetaData' field to incorporate non-image data as part of the file. Possibly this could include a 'Digital WaterMark,' or some other form of ID for thier IP.
The MPAA would likely develop software that would search files on a users computer for the ID or DWM.
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Anonymous Cowards start out with 0.
"True-Colour GIF" is a hack. It appears to work by putting multiple tiled bitmaps in an image, each with its own palette. Since the palettes are not compressed, this is terribly inefficient.
since if you really do want lossless compression you wouldn't be using JPEG* to begin with
That's an erroneous assumption, since in effect, both GIF and JPEG are lossy. GIF loses color depth, which in many images is fatal, even with adaptive dithering, and JPEG loses color accuracy and detail and lotsa stuff. Sometimes JPEG is the better of the two undesirable alternatives, and PNG is impractical, such as in online publication of photos.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
IANAL, but trademarks must be defended to allow a way for them to expire.
Patents and copyrights have a limited lifespan (too long in some cases, but that's a topic for another time). Once they expire, people no longer need to worry about accidentally violating one.
Trademarks don't expire as long as they're defended. If they lasted forever, we would have a lawsuit mine field as people drag ancient, obscure trademarks out of their family history and sue.
Sheesh!
http://siokaos.org/
when and how did the IP you reference become free?
that is, the e.e. times piece states that *most*
(but possibly not all) of [the involved]
companies offer licensing at no cost.
does this include IBM for arithmetic coding
which seems integral to the standard?
(tom lane's independent JPEG group had to
yank arithmetic coding because of IBM)?
and where has AT&T, crucial contributor
to wavelet theory, disclaimed their rights,
especially after selling wavelet-based DJVU
to lizardtech, mentioned as a principal on
p. 204 in the "patent statement" in annex L
of fcd15444-1.pdf at the JP2K site?
this annex, part of the official standard,
does not disclaim for-profit licensing rights!
clearer statements from the standards body
going beyond the mere requirement that licensing
need only be "non-discriminatory" are needed
to interest mavens of open software.
Why? There's already the user option not to see any signatures at all, which is the preferable choice in all cases.
Whoa... check out line 18 of their HTML source!!! They're using a gif!
<td valign="TOP"><img src="./images/titles/j2klinks.gif"><br>
Could be, or it's sleep deprivation.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
He did not, as he did not have access to a JPEG2000 encoder.
I agree - it is an improvement, just not a very large one. A reasonable question, in this day of 40G hard drives and fat-pipe DSL and cable modems, is whether we care about a 10% reduction in bandwidth for the same quality level.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Talking of trolls, Zoyd....
Moderators, time to start moderating down the Zoyd troll. I don't know about most Slashdot readers, but I just can't believe that someone could still hold anti-feminist views that resemble the attitude of society in the 1800s in 2000.Not to mention that you seem to have an explosive temper and immediately cut into anything that you don't like without really examining the situation. Take this post apart and rant evilly about each line, perhaps it'll make you look more intelligent.
Who's the troll here, Zoyd?
no sig
Bah. ASP is crap. Have you seen any DivX encoded AVI movies? ~600 MB, 2 hours of video, approaching DVD quality (up to 720 x 480, 30 frames/second)
Here is a good link.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I think that the availability of the Independent JPEG Group's free cross-platform library was crucial for the success of the JPEG image file format.
It was available before continuous-tone images were in everyday-use, so it was pretty stable at the time everyone needed good lossy image compression. And only the parts of the many JPEG variants were used that offered a) superior performance compared to other formats and b) were free to use (so, not arithmetic coding).
Do you know of any plans to create a similar library for JPEG2000?
The main problem with fractal compression is not patent problems.
It's that it doesn't work.
That is to say, it doesn;t work usefully.
To explain: in order to get efficent compression, you need to use something called an IFS (Iterated Function System). These can be used to represent an image, but only if the IFS used is sufficently "similar" to the target image. And there in lies the problem. IFS's are good for generating natural looking images, but generating an IFS from an image is an inverse process. And has not been solved.
State of the are is to use the graduate student theorm to produce an IFS for your image, but this is expensive:
Take a gradutate student, give him a graphics workstation, lock him in a room, and don't let him out until he's come up with an IFS for your image.
This take 100 hours, of input from a grad student, in order to come up with an IFS. Not exactly mass market tech.
There was discovered a way (by one of said gradstudents) to automatically come up with an IFS that is "quite similar" to the image, called Partitioned Integreadted Function Systems (PIFS). Unfortunatle, they're not proper IFS, and the 10 000:1 compression went out of the window, and dropped to 50:1 or so. At 50:1 compression, with patent issues, and a slow algorithm, it just wasn't worth it.
Aside: The technology is patented under US patent 4,941,193. I'd link on IBM, but it's down. Partitioned IFS are US patent 5,065,447. More data in comp.compression FAQ here.
A quarterly invite for suggestions on slashdot would be nice.
Last time Slashdot covered this story, the EE Times article had a very hyped-up comparison showing JPEG2000 to be dramatically better than plain JPEG. Upon closer examination, while JPEG2000 is better, the difference is not very dramatic, as this comparison shows.
If this technology is not free for free software implemenation, forever, then my advice is to avoid it like the plague. I hope they do release the technology for free, but even then some care is called for. After all, you definitely don't want to send a JPEG2000 image to a browser that doesn't properly support it. One can only hope that the browser support is better than that for, say PNG.
The idea of sending images at multiple resolutions, one for the screen and one for printing, is an excellent one. However, it's not fundamentally the responsibility of the image format, but rather of the hypertext protocol. The idea has been around for a while - the first time I saw it was in Ted Nelson's Xanadu proposal. Damn, the old guys stole all our best ideas! Again!
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
even a 10% reduction would be nice, expecially for those without fat pipes, or people using laptops or wireless internet access.
just my opinion, ignore as you see fit
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
> My question to the group here is, if JPEG2000 takes off and
> companies and individuals who have not previously declared
> IP come forward and want royalties, will the standard be hurt?
Of course the standard would be hurt; in fact, I dare wager it would die. There simply isn't any place in the crowded market for any more IP-laden so-called "standards." Quite frankly, the existing JPEG format is good enough for most Internet images requiring 16 bit color, and for high-quality lossless images nothing beats PNG. I seriously doubt that the JP2K (needs shortening) standard will use less disk space/bandwidth than PNG, and it definitely won't create better quality since PNG is essentially lossless in the first place. JP2K decoding will also be more hardware-intensive than PNG, meaning it will be entirely inadequate for low-powered cellphones/PDAs/other portable appliances, which negates the benefits of being able to encode once for streaming from different bandwidths.
Another advantage of PNG which most people don't realize is that by reducing the color palette of low-res web graphics to 256, the same palette of GIF, you get a file which typically can be only 25-75% of the size of the same file saved as GIF. But that's a non-issue since the GIF patent is running out soon, and most people never get shaken down now as it is.
In other words, there's really no need for JP2K. Since PNG hasn't been picked up very well outside of Japan, where it is a fairly common format (just go to a japan.binaries.* anime newsgroup to see some...iluminating...examples), look for 1 of 2 things to happen to JP2K if it is indeed royalty-free: either it will be incorporated into new Web browsers and image viewers by default since it's heralded as the JPEG for the new millenium, and slowly take over with old JPEGs still dominating for a couple of years, or no one will care and continue to use JPEGS since they're easier and more standardized. If however someone pushes IP claims and the new standard is tainted with charges, look for no one to ever, ever, ever use it except for Adobe Photoshop and its clones; it will never come into general usage. Look at how common the similar LuraWave Format is, after all: not common at all.
Fact is, there's no need at all for JP2K. Wavelet compression has a coolness factor for geeks, but it's essentially useless. As I said, JPEG and GIF are already at the "sweet spots" for bandwidth/features, especially with the GIF patent issue ending soon. PNG with a reduced palette would be ideal for a lower-bandwidth GIF replacement if only it'd be heralded as a standard and PNG support were made almost universal, and for high-res images PNG is already perfect, lossless, beautiful. There's just no need at all for JP2K, and it would have been much better for everyone if the standards group had just endorsed PNG and the options of reduced-palette variants instead of uselessly inventing a new and IP-complicated standard.
> Is there a place for a part-2 which contains IP which is not free?
Yes: in a musty corner of a Photoshop dialogue box, where it will stay and not bother the rest of us.
> And, what applications does the community here see as being crucial
> for the adoption of JPEG2000?
The more important question is: How can the JP2K group convince people that there's a need for a new standard to replace 2 that are working just fine for general Net use, and 1 more which is perfect for high-res graphics and can also create smaller-sized GIF replacements when the palette is reduced in your image editor. We should just ignore JP2K and hope it goes away, since it's a resource-hog which doesn't make a better JPEG than JPEG, a better GIF than GIF, or a better PNG than PNG. But we should quietly implement it in Mozilla and Gimp and whatever else, just in case, as long as it's free.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
I agree that not everyone has fat pipes, and I don't want to be a techno-elitist.
However, waiting interminably for pages to download seems to me to be more a problem of bad Web design than inadequate compression. For one, it's very common to see images out there that could be compressed a lot more than they are. For example, when images have sharp chroma boundaries, a lot of people crank up the quality setting to the max to try to compensate for JPEG's well known chroma bleeding problems. However, with good software (like the Gimp) in skilled hands, you can adjust the chroma subsampling to 1:1, which will give excellent results at low Q, ie a better tradeoff.
JPEG works pretty damn well. JPEG2000 is better. But I am not yet convinced that the advantages are really worth the pain of upgrading to a new format, especially if it's not free as JPEG baseline is. If you really care about compression, there's plenty you can do using existing tools.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
They should give us JPEG2000Lib.
As formats get more features and capabilities they get more complex. I don't think JPEG would be worth implementing on my own since the amount of time it would take me to code the thing wouldn't be worth the benefits that JPEG2000 has over Standard JPEG or PNG (both of which have freely available implementations)
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
A lot of people want Apple to release a QT player for Unix. Ha! I wouldn't touch the damn thing. There's no way I'll ever put an Apple software on my Unix machines after that mess! (The Windows machine wasn't important. I'm glad I discovered the evil there first.)
Would you give Steve Case root on your box? I don't think so.
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This post is not redundant, please don't moderate it as such. I repeat, this post is not redundant.
--
I like to watch.
The comment in the article, warning about people holding IP crawling out of the woodwork if the standard is successful is definitely one to watch.
What would be fair is to have a set period for public commentary during which IP holders would have to declare their intent to enforce their rights, or forever hold their peace. But the situation we have now seems tailor-made to encourage immoral-but-legal submarining like Unisys did with GIF.
It's beyond me why failure to defend one's IP claims in a timely manner doesn't have the same weakening effect on patents as it does on trademarks.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Wavelet compression has a coolness factor for geeks, but it's essentially useless.
That's what I was replying to when I mentioned audio as another application. Don't accuse me of being annoying when you don't clarify your own points.
Second, PNG is great if you want lossless compression. I don't dispute that. However, bandwidth is sometimes a concern, in which case you may use lossy compression. If jpg and a wavelet format were equally supported by Netscape/IE, then I would generally lean towards a wavelet format for high-compression images.
Finally, I was also unclear when I mentioned resizing. I should've separated this into two things: rescaling (which you covered), and changing the aspect ratio. High-compression jpg images do not handle aspect ratio changes very well at all. Wavelet-compressed images DO handle these, though.
Granted, in a perfect world, we would all have access to original images in their uncompressed format before trying to modify them. And usually that is the case. But once in awhile you may have to deal with less than optimal conditions. That's all I was trying to point out.
SEAL
None of this response addresses my concerns.
The JPEG encoder sucks. The test image was dithered - not a good candidate for JPEG encoding, *especially* with their crappy encoder.
JPEG2K may perform well with text, but it will never perform as well as PNG or GIF. That's because it's intended for photographs (hence the P in JPEG - "Joint Photographic Experts Group").
The fact is, the experiments described in the paper showed nothing.
-Dave Turner.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
As a technical member of the JPEG2000 body, I have to say that sitting in and participating in the meetings was quite an interesting experience. As always, there were a number of technical issues to resolve, but the most heated and often most time was spent on IP issues. The comment in the article, warning about people holding IP crawling out of the woodwork if the standard is successful is definitely one to watch. While I have not been involved in the last couple of meetings, I'm still actively involved in following what has been happening technology wise. The benefit of wavelet compression is not so much in compression quality, but in features. From a file, one can get multiple resolutions, multiple quality levels, selective decoding of a specific region (random access), etc. This should be a benefit in the long run. The article touches on it briefly, but one down side to the new standard is that it is more resoure intensive than the current JPEG even PNG formats -- in memory and cpu power. I suspect it will be a while until we see wireless devices with the resources to handle the format in a general purpose manner. A custom ASIC solution is a possibility, but would a device like a Palm Pilot include one? What are the factors that lead to the improved quality and additional complexity? JPEG2000 is based upon wavelet compression. The standard allows for tiling images, but it is more typical that the whole image is compressed, for most applications. Unlike JPEG, where pixels are grouped into 8x8 blocks, wavelet schemes which operate upon the whole image have a lot more data to play with when it comes to throwing away (quantizing) information. If one were to attempt to use the standard with 8x8 tiles, well, it would not work very well. Because of this increase in data that is part of the working set, the amount of memory needed, when compared with JPEG is, in most cases, much greater. During the JPEG2000 process, a few companies proposed block-based wavelet solutions which would reduce this complexity without sacrificing feature set or even quality. However, they were not included due to concerns over the companies not making the IP available on a free and non-discriminatory basis. There has been a part-2 to JPEG2000 proposed that will allow for the inclusion of technologies which IP is not necessarily free. My question to the group here is, if JPEG2000 takes off and companies and individuals who have not previously declared IP come forward and want royalties, will the standard be hurt? Is there a place for a part-2 which contains IP which is not free? And, what applications does the community here see as being crucial for the adoption of JPEG2000? --martin
"The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Joint Bi- Level Image experts Group (JBIG) are joint committees of the ITU (Telecommunications branch, ITU-T) and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG1. They have been meeting for over ten years, initially starting as a working group of SC2, responsible for character coding."
I sure am glad that the ITU-T and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG1 started as SC2. This allows for many more useless acronyms to spawn. Maybe the final group will be the JPEGJBIGITU-TISO/IECJTC1SC29WG1SC22/7 group. Did they translate their original group names from German?
Know ye not that ye are Gods???
We did a JPEG vs JPEG2000 comparison for a class project here. The improvement seems to be dramatic, especially at low bit rates.
Did anyone else notice that the JPEG2000 image/logo on the above website is actually a GIF image? Hmm...
Fractal compression is very cool. It's sort of like a vector format, in a way...it has no inherent size. It can also achieve insane levels of compression. There was a small article on it several years ago in Scientific American, written (IIRC) by the inventor. The examples were very impressive.
Unfortunately, patents bite us on the butt once again. The format is patented by its creator, who runs an image software business (Iterated Systems). I'm not sure when or if the patent will revert to the public domain, either, since it's a British patent and I know nothing about how Britain handles IP law.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
> Wavelet image compression is lossy. Therefore you can get much smaller file
:-) I wasn't talking about the type of compression, I was clearly talking about its application to image files. I repeat: *useless*. There are better tools for the job, and this is coming from someone who works with image files of different formats and uses intensely, day after day. JP2K is a bad hack, which attempts to replace other, better, tools.
> sizes compared to PNG, which is lossless as you point out. One of the reasons
> to use wavelet compressed images is for high compression.
Yes, you *do* get much smaller file sizes with Wavelet images than with PNG, depending on quality settings of course; but I'm afraid it's a case of me not being clear, rather than a mistake about the technology. What I meant to say in that sentence, and expressed poorly, is that I doubt an equivalently high-quality JP2K image would be at all smaller than the same image saved as a PNG, nor would an equivalently low-quality JP2K save much space over a regular JPEG. But I should have used the "Preview" button on that and caught my poor expression of the notion. My intent was to separate the high-quality from the low-quality uses of JP2K, and state that PNG is better for high-quality and JPEG is at least as useful for low- to medium-quality. There is absolutely no need to use a clunky hack of a file format to do the work of 2 other formate which are better suited to the task. It's like using a Swiss Army knife in place of a screwdriver and a pair of scissors--it'll do the job, but not as easily and comfortably as just having a screwdriver and a pair of scissors ready.
> Utter crap. Wavelet compressed images offer a couple benefits. They look better
> than standard jpgs if both are highly compressed
But as for the image quality of Wavelet compressed images, I have to respectfully disagree that they look better than existing formats. They re-scale to a larger size better, but that begs the question of why you aren't just using a larger JPEG in the first place. Remember the "clunky hack" comment I made above? Doubly so. Plus, re-scaling the images back upwards *does* result in loss of quality, just a different sort of loss from that found in regular JPEGS. You see, as you re-scale a Wavelet compressed image upwards, you lose detail information--the repeated color areas often start to look dull and not nearly as detailed. This is the opposite of JPEG images which, when re-scaled, show too many artifacts of the type of compression which was designed in the first place to preserve that detail. So, Wavelet compressed images once re-scaled lack detail, whereas JPEG gets some of the detail wrong when re-scaled due to compression artifacts. Before you get obnoxious again and say I'm full of crap, or whatever, the reason I *know* what I'm talking about is because I work with graphics files all the time, and often have to scale them up or down for various uses. I've also experimented with most of the availably formats, including the LuraWave Format (LWF) which is essentially very, very similar to JP2K. So don't get your panties in a bundle, I know what I'm talking about.
Which brings me to another point as to why JP2K is useless: after much experimenting, I came to the conclusion that the best way to store graphics for high-quality non-bandwidth-limited usage is PNG, plain and simple, there's nothing more useful and compact for the quality. For bandwidth or disk space limited uses, nothing is usually better than JPEG with the proper settings, especially for compatibility's sake; however, many times PNG would be a better answer in terms of both size and quality *if you reduce the palette* to between 256 and 5000 colors, depending on the image and the amount of colors you can take away before the average human eye even notices. Even on a big 32-bit screen, many images--even photographic ones--look better as PNGs with about 1000 colors than as JPEGS with 30+ thousand colors. One reason is the retention of detail with PNG, which is NOT present with Wavelet-compressed images. I repeat, make your images the right size before you save them in their finished formats, and no one will have to resize them later to either too-low-detail resized JP2Ks or too-artifected JPEG. And at any rate, PNG remains the best format in terms of ability to be resized well, even with lowered palette counts. So I repeat, *JP2K is USELESS.*
> Oh yeah, and aside from images, wavelet compression has uses in audio. Useless
> isn't a word I would describe it with.
Don't get all anooying.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Yes, PNG support is crappy, but wouldn't it be easier to improve PNG support than add JPEG2000 support? (And yes, Quicktime is evil)
More to the point, why is PNG support so pitiful? Maybe if it was defined by standard PNG/1105/ISO-6011-GRAF everyone would have stood up and taken more notice of it. Heck, maybe the responsible thing for the committee to do would be to endorse PNG as it's favoured lossless compression format...
The benefit of JPEG2000 is not just the quality possible at low bit rates, but also the flexibility.
The benefits are mostly in the progressive download/compression vein, in that for each bit you download, your image becomes one bit clearer (to a point) so the same picture can be used by two people for different purposes.
For example, thumbnails can now be generated on the fly, instead of having two copies of the same image, just send the first X bytes to produce a thumbnail.
Nodecam (who can't remember his password, and doesn't seem to be able to check his mail
Frnakly, the comparison above (Chew and Choo) is bogus. The sample picture of a person was dithered. And GIMP gave *much* prettier results at the same compression ratio when I converted it to a JPEG. I don't know where Chew and Choo got their encoder...
Further, 2/3s of the images they looked at were outside of JPEG territory. They were sharp-edged patterns, or text. That's what GIFs are for!
I found Raph Levien's comparison much more enlightening; I wonder if Chew and Choo were "expected" to get certain results...
-Dave Turner.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
IIRC, at least one version of Microsoft Encarta uses fractal compression (they licensed technology from Interated Systems) to store images. So I'd say it *is* practical.
Raph Leviens conclusions are interesting but they only tell half the story about Jpeg2000.
Getting better compression ratios is not the only objective of the Jpeg2000 standard. It has lots and lots of other features that make it attractive besides impressive compression ratios.
First a little overview of compression. Compression schemes can be fitted into a three step framework:
Transform->Quantization->Entropy Code.
The transform part is where the data is massaged into something that is more suitable for compressing. The aims of this step is to remove redundant information as much as possible. In images pixels are very redundant. Pixels close together have very often the same color.
The transform part of the current Jpeg is the DCT transform.
The second step is quantization. This is where we throw away information that we can live without.
Finally comes Entropy coding. This is where the actual compression takes place. Common values in the data are here represented
by short bitstrings and those who occur seldom get longer bitstrings. In current Jpeg this is Huffman coding.
Raph talks about downsampling the image before compressing. That is exactly what Jpeg2000 does. The transform part of Jpeg2000 is a multiresolution analysis of the image. It takes the original image and downsamples it to a very small image. Then it adds in layers the information needed to upsample it to a higher resolution and get a perfect reconstruction. This is nice for lots of reasons. We can tell the decoder to stop downloading more details of the image at any time. You don't have to download the whole image if you don't want to. Nice for low bandwith connections and mobile connections. You can also choose to progress to a compleatly lossless version.
But Jpeg2000 does even more. It segments the image into tiles. This gives you the possibility to download only the regions of the image you are interested in in high resolution (good for porno - you only get the tits!).
The current Jpeg has only one transform, the DCT transform. Jpeg2000 v1 will have two transforms to choose between: An floating point transform for high performance compression and an integer only transform for use on low-end devices. That transform also allows you to get a perfect reconstruction. In Jpeg2000 v2 you can even specify your own transform coefficients and by that adapt the transform step to the data you have.
So even though the Jpeg2000 standard has rate/distortion similar to current Jpeg (that is Raphs point) it offers other very attractive features such as progressive decoding (giving you almost any resolution you want), regions of interest and the possibility to only get parts of the image if you are on low-bandwidth links.
Thanks
Hrafnkell
This is serious horseshit. To the right of me I have a copy of The Matrix on CD, its about 400MB and it is nowhere near DVD quality. Maybe your on a teeny tiny moniter or something, but I cant actually stand to watch that version of The Matrix after seeing the DVD. There are loads of (what appear to be) compression artifacts everywhere and the picture lacks detail. Also, the sound quality sucks compared to the DVD. Probably not noticable at all on most of those crap PC speakers that get shipped with systems, but kinda noticable when you've forked out for a meaty home theatre style speaker setup.
In short, Windows Media doesnt compare to DVD *at all*. Its about comparable to RealVideo, even then Real has better sound quality.
Nick
Nick
I'm sure someone else said it, but how far away is moving picture(mpeg)2000? that'd be nice.....
when I find myself you'll be the first to know.
My question is... Will it support wavelet compression, i.e. an image will look different based on how much of the file you've download, or and/or how much you need to render. FYI. This is NOT the same as Progressive-encoding (.gif)
http://siokaos.org/
Metadata mechanisms make it possible to incorporate additional non-image data as part of the file Wonder if the virus-makers are already looking forward to seeing what they can do with that... Later.
It's funny that things need air to breathe
.- CitizenC (User Info)
Why don't they create a video compression format that only reencodes the portion of the image that changes (5% +/- for sensitivity)?
http://siokaos.org/
--Ben
http://www.jpeg.org/JPEG2000.htm
This is the jpeg.org website for the JPEG2000 specs. It contains articles about the format, etc...
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
I agree. This article tossed around a lot of details that seemed intriguing at first, but when I read it more carefully, I found I had a lot of maybes, vaporware announcements and 'stuff that will be resolved later'
Okay, it made me think a little. But was it really the best of the day's submissions with 250 in the queue? I bet it wasn't.
And there's no system for the readers to give The Compound feedback on their choices. I won't design an amp or robot arm without "negative feedback" -- it'll go out of control. the Slashers are ignoring some basic control theory
In my opinion, Quicktime 4 for IE/Win32 destroyed any chance of PNG becoming a widespread supplement to JPEG. It invades Internet Explorer and rather irritatingly takes over any and all PNG display. It is slower than black molasses sin on a hot day, takes forever to load a page with a PNG on it, and the image is not scrollable or manipulatable anymore. It is absolutely the most frustrating behavior to remove, and uninstalling QT from the system does nothing to prevent this irritating behavior. Congratulations Apple for fucking up PNG in millions of browsers.
I seriously doubt that the JP2K (needs shortening) standard will use less disk space/bandwidth than PNG, and it definitely won't create better quality since PNG is essentially lossless in the first place.
Wavelet image compression is lossy. Therefore you can get much smaller file sizes compared to PNG, which is lossless as you point out. One of the reasons to use wavelet compressed images is for high compression. Most of us don't crunch jpgs down too much because they end up looking like crap. Wavelet compressed images tend to retain their visual quality better.
Fact is, there's no need at all for JP2K. Wavelet compression has a coolness factor for geeks, but it's essentially useless.
Utter crap. Wavelet compressed images offer a couple benefits. They look better than standard jpgs if both are highly compressed. Also, the compression is not scale-dependent. FFT-based lossy compression has problems with this. In other words, if you compress a 320x200 image into a jpg, and then resize that image to different dimensions, image quality will suffer. It becomes more noticeable the more you compress. Wavelet based images don't suffer from this problem.
Oh yeah, and aside from images, wavelet compression has uses in audio. Useless isn't a word I would describe it with.
The IP issues, you hit the nail on the head. The only way to really break a new format / protocol / whatever into mainstream use is to make it freely available. Look at mp3. If Fraunhofer had clamped down on mp3 as soon as it became available, it probably wouldn't enjoy the popularity it has today. Of course now they are trying to bring home the bacon, but that's another story...
Best regards,
SEAL
I respect that you work with graphics a lot (I don't, but I use GIMP every now and then...) however I think your absolute invalidation of JP2K is unwarranted. Let just find out for ourselves. Comparing lossy to lossless compression in my mind is like comparing apples to oranges, since if you really do want lossless compression you wouldn't be using JPEG* to begin with, HOWEVER I think we can all benefit from your information that PNG restricted to thousands of colors or less compresses well with good quality--I think I'm going to try experimenting with indexed palettes and PNGs.
the real at&t mix
http://djvu.research.att.com/ All the lovely impressive features of jpeg2000, already implemented. Bloody impressive. :)
Have you ever thought about your need to do this? Maybe it's implying that you're lame.
It's right. Dumbass.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
If you don't want to read through specs and prefer a down-to-earth explanation of features etc, check this Designer article on JPEG2K and what it will mean to web design of future. Excellent stuff.
--
GroundAndPound.com News and info for martial artists of all styles.
Will the MPAA try to kill this technology. This would be a techology that could be used to send images from a movie or even an entire movie over the internet. This technology must certainly violate the DMCA. In fact most technology violates the DMCA. Beware the MPAA is doing time travel experiments. They are going to send the DMCA back in time to stop digital images, then before that the VCR then before that photocopies, bethen photography, bethen paintings, bethen pigments, bethen scratches on rocks, bethen rocks, bethen matter.
The DMCA and the evil machinations of the MPAA must be stopped before they destroy all creation.
We must destroy the MPAA so that there is a future in which images can be communicated freely.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
and -- nice to hear -- Open Source acceptance.
You know, I remember 3 years ago this would have been incredible, mind-blowing news. Open Source? They know what Open Source is? The headline would read:
Mainstream Press Mentions Open Source
The fact that OS is mentioned is relegated to a footnote in the article writeup is a sign of how far we have come in the last few years.
Like many powerful forces, glaciers for instance, it may take awhile to get moving, but once it gains momentum it has the power to move mountains and change the surface of the earth forever.
A late night, philosphical musing from
Mycroft-X
As a technical member of the JPEG2000 body, I have to say that sitting in and participating in the meetings was quite an interesting experience. As always, there were a number of technical issues to resolve, but the most heated and often most time was spent on IP issues. The comment in the article, warning about people holding IP crawling out of the woodwork if the standard is successful is definitely one to watch. While I have not been involved in the last couple of meetings, I'm still actively involved in following what has been happening technology wise. The benefit of wavelet compression is not so much in compression quality, but in features. From a file, one can get multiple resolutions, multiple quality levels, selective decoding of a specific region (random access), etc. This should be a benefit in the long run. The article touches on it briefly, but one down side to the new standard is that it is more resoure intensive than the current JPEG even PNG formats -- in memory and cpu power. I suspect it will be a while until we see wireless devices with the resources to handle the format in a general purpose manner. A custom ASIC solution is a possibility, but would a device like a Palm Pilot include one? What are the factors that lead to the improved quality and additional complexity? JPEG2000 is based upon wavelet compression. The standard allows for tiling images, but it is more typical that the whole image is compressed, for most applications. Unlike JPEG, where pixels are grouped into 8x8 blocks, wavelet schemes which operate upon the whole image have a lot more data to play with when it comes to throwing away (quantizing) information. If one were to attempt to use the standard with 8x8 tiles, well, it would not work very well. Because of this increase in data that is part of the working set, the amount of memory needed, when compared with JPEG is, in most cases, much greater. During the JPEG2000 process, a few companies proposed block-based wavelet solutions which would reduce this complexity without sacrificing feature set or even quality. However, they were not included due to concerns over the companies not making the IP available on a free and non-discriminatory basis. There has been a part-2 to JPEG2000 proposed that will allow for the inclusion of technologies which IP is not necessarily free. My question to the group here is, if JPEG2000 takes off and companies and individuals who have not previously declared IP come forward and want royalties, will the standard be hurt? Is there a place for a part-2 which contains IP which is not free? And, what applications does the community here see as being crucial for the adoption of JPEG2000? Good night and enjoy.. -jim
Someone in the printing industry could market a printer with a lamination feature and could clean up in the marketplace...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Is this really needed? I'm not too up on the graphics arena, but it seems to me this isn't really any new discovery or wonderful thing.
-nick
(anticipating -1: flamebait)
After reading the article, I found that not only are they talking about cameras and wireless Internet technology, but printers also. I think this bodes well for Linux and Open Source. It seems that some printers will eventually accept JPEG2000 input as a source. Since things like WYSIWYG word processors and graphicals web browsers basically render an image to a screen, would it be that much harder to render the image to /dev/lp0? That'd be pretty sweet. Now all us Linux people can buy cheap printers that do rendering in software :) Hopefully.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Why is it that the /.ers at this time of day (10:32 PST) can only see the PORN advantave ;~]
--
$ whoami
nobody
The .ASF video/audio format from Microsoft is seriously good. I was stunned by the quality - especially the audio - when I first saw Wierd Al's "The Saga Begins". Check it out for yourself here. The 100kbs stream is good, the 300kbs steam is very nearly TV quality.