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JPEG2000 Coming Soon
Sonny writes "In a few months time, internet users will be able to make use of the JPEG2000 standard which, its developers claim, enables web graphics to be downloaded much faster than is currently possible. This will not only make graphics-heavy web pages easier to download, it will also preserve image quality. The JPEG standard compresses image files which are then transmitted across the web faster than uncompressed files. Now, researchers at universities around the world have developed JPEG2000, the next-generation image-compression technology under the auspices of the International Standards Organisation. It is the first major upgrade of the standard since it first appeared in the early '90s. What is also important about the technology is its ability to send files without loss of data, which is not the case with current JPEG files. To take advantage of a JPEG2000, web browsers will need a Plug-In for either Internet Explorer or Netscape browsers. These free plug-in's are expected to be available later this year. The extension for the new files will be ".jp2"."
"If we aren't all using PNG right now, there's no way we're gonna be using jp2 "
.PNG wasn't adopted in the internet world is that it didn't compress enough. Also, it's alpha channel was never really utilized. There are those in the 3D-Art world that think .PNG is a god-send, however.
You're talking about the difference between 300k and 20k. The reason that
JPEG2000 has a few things going for it:
- Familiar Name
- Familiar Standard
- Smaller filesizes
- Likely to be better supported by IE and other browsers
"Derp de derp."
See this bugzilla entry for Mozilla's jpeg2000 progress.
Doesn't seem too promising:
If you look at appendix L of the jpeg2000 draft, there are 22 companies who believe that implementing the spec may require use of their patents.
PNG still hasn't taken off despite being supported in all major browsers (now if only IE did proper alpha, any year now...), how much chance does an image format that requires third party plugins have?
...smaller files than JPG.
Sorry, try again. An image compessed with PNG (even at the highest compression setting) will tend be considerably larger than the image compresed with JPEG. What PNG gives you is lossless compression and an alpha channel (that's not even properly supported in many browsers).
I read the internet for the articles.
According to this pdf,
.9
the report compares 4 compression codecs, and found for a small sample found:
MEAN LOSSLESS COMPRESSION RATIOS (big is good)
------------------
JPEG 2000: 2.5
JPEG-LS: 2.98
L-JPEG: 2.09
PNG: 3.52
JPEG-LS is was usually the best, but PNG had a few really good sample that pushed its average up. Actually, these outliers appear important, because that is what really separates the codecs on this metric.
Lossless Decoding Times, relative to JPEG-LS (big is bad)
-----------------
JPEG 2000: 4.3
JPEG-LS: 1
L-JPEG:
PNG: 1.2
This doesn't make JPG2K appear too impressive. What it does offer, however, is features. Like Region Of Interest (ROI) coding, good lossy compression, random access, and other goodies that some people may really care about. The report claims that png doesn't do lossy encoding, which is news to me, but it does appear to be one of their major selling points for jpeg-2000 over png.
Hey, I've implemented a JPEG-2000 codec using
a BSD-style license.
It's been tested at the MIT biodmedical department already for compression of medical images.
It's available at http://j2000.org/.
It would be nice to see this work in my favourite browsers.
Several things, besides simply "good compression."
JP2 uses wavelet compression such that an image is effectively compressed at various resolutions below the originally, independently. Not only does this allow a high level of redundancy removal (which is why wavelets are good in the first place) and thus high compression, but jp2 tags each of these sections (subbands) separately in the compressed file.
So what? Well, a file with all of these sections is effectively a losslessly compressed image. However, this file can be further compressed (loss-ily) by simply throwing out some of these tagged sections! That is, you can make a "lossless" thumbnail image by keeping all the lower resolution subbands. Or, you can get a lower-quality (but smaller) fullsize version by throwing out some subbands at each resolution.
Better still, this manipulation can be done without decompressing the original image. Simply using only certain tagged sections of the file.
Consider this possible application of all this: Digital Cameras. A camera could take images at full resolution and lossless quality until the memory card starts filling up. Then, gradually as more and more room is required, it could quickly reduce the size or quality of previous pictures to make room for new pictures. Thus, you always have "enough" room for more pictures, provided you don't mind the quality reduction.
Of course, there are numerous uses for web applications -- thumbnails and full-sized images could be the same file, provided the web server knows how to parse the image file. (Little or no computation necessary, just sending parts of the file)
Anyways, JPEG2000 is very very cool.
"What a narrowminded and stupid thing to say. You will never update a browser that removes standard features? So in otherwords, you want your browser (/OS/all other programs etc) to be a collection of legacy junk which can never be changed for fear of alienating you?"
Um, no. I don't want to upgrade to a browser by a company who wants to bend standards in their favor, leaving other browsers unable to cope. The advantage to Netscape Style Plug-ins over ActiveX controls is that they play in other browsers like Netscape (DUH!) and Opera. This isn't a case of an old standard no longer being followed, it's a case of MS changing the de-facto standard so that IE remains dominant. So no, I'm not willing to change browser/OS/etc over this.
Now that IE doesn't support non-standard controls, this means that anybody who makes an IE plug-in is stuck making an ActiveX interface.
My favorite browser is Opera. It doesn't support ActiveX. According to their site, it won't support ActiveX. Here's a quote:
"Opera does not support ActiveX, nor does it support VBScript. There are three reasons for this:
Opera Software AS is committed to supporting open Internet standards, recommended by the W3C, something neither ActiveX nor VBScript, being license issued Microsoft technologies, are.
The second reason is much more simple: There's just not enough market demand for these technologies to warrant the cost of implementing them.
In addition, some reports raise the question of how secure ActiveX is. It has been claimed that ActiveX has serious problems with security, and some even say that the problem is an almost complete lack of security. The same concerns have been raised about VBScript."
So besides making me stick with an insecure plug-in interface, what other reason is there for me to go to IE6 or newer?
"Changes sometimes need to happen, and given that by the time the change to 6.0 happened there was no plugin that I ever ran into that didn't have an ActiveX version, there's no reason for your ranting. "
Changes? Sure! But to disable a widely used technology? Uh uh. Sorry. I'm not rolling over and taking that. True narrowmindedness would be if I were to say "Okay Microsoft, thank you for making the choice for me. You know more than I do!"
As for not being able to get an ActiveX version of a plug-in, I can give you an example: The company I work for. (Who shall remain nameless.)
IE 6's betas supported our plug-in just fine. And then, once it was released, I had customers telling me it no longer worked. Somewhere between beta 2 and release they removed support for it. Did they tell us (a registerred MS Developer...)? No. They just did it. Their knowledge base called the removal of Netscape Style Plugins 'a security feature."
Interesting, I guess not being able to run as much stuff means less chance of security breach. Whatever. Maybe if MS had said "In 6 months when IE 6 is released, it won't support NSP's" Id have little room to gripe. But MS just did it. So my company (a startup company I might add) is forced to write an ActiveX control. We looked into it, and its not as easy as it may seem. For one thing, our product has a lot of web-based features that would all need to be rigourously tested. Since browser functionality is not our core focus right now, we don't have the engineering time to spend on it. Do our customers understand that? Only after I explain our priorities to them.
The worst part is that IE doesn't give any clue as to what is wrong. The behaviour of running a NSP on IE is the same as not having a plugin installed at all! What a wonderful way to prevent MS from getting customer service complaints!
In any case, thanks for calling me narrow-minded even though it's pretty obvious I know more about this topic than you do.
Getting back to the original topic, I hope the JPEG2000 group releases a Netscape Style Plugin so I can use it with Opera. I am geninuinely concerned that what they'll do is release an ActiveX version because IE is the dominant browser, and that's it. If they do that, they'll be further supporting MS's dominance. Unfortunately, I can see JPEG2000 causing that if the images are really as compressed as they say.
"Derp de derp."
But web pages aren't the only things digital images are used in. Think cameras.
This site illustrates the difference in quality between JPEG and JPEG2K. You get essentially a 5x reduction in storage space without losing quality, and the type of artifacts aren't as annoying, either.
If there's any indication that this will actually be out in a few months, I missed it.
If there's anything indicating JPEG2000 support for Mozilla, The Gimp, Paint Shop Pro, or Photoshop in the near future, I missed it.
I've yet to see anything that indicates there are no more patent issues and that people can support this format without patent issues (Read "Can the Gimp ship with this?")
Regarding Exploer PNG support:
AlphaImageLoader Filter:
Displays an image within the boundaries of the object and between the object background and content, with options to clip or resize the image. When loading a Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image, tranparency--from zero to 100 percent is supported.
Just because I do miss it, I still see almost no support for the beloved fractal image format *.fif I think it's now part of LizardTech's line of image compression/fractal tools. If you think jpeg200 offers compression, then you missed the fif format completely.
No Zen is good zen
Yes, the reference is on MSDN's site.
It's not complicated to use, it's just awkward, and you need to use PHP (or Javascript, or some other solution) if you want it to work in both IE in Mozilla. Here's an example of how I've done it in the past:
<img src="blank.gif" style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.A
<? } else { ?>
<img src="imagewithalpha.png">
<? } ?>
The implementation of this in IE seems to be pretty good -- at least I haven't run into any problems with it.
Jason.