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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"."
And only two years late, too!
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
Oh, and FP, BITCHES!
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
More pr0n, quicker.
If we aren't all using PNG right now, there's no way we're gonna be using jp2
I think we're just stuck with jpeg and gif for about the next 5-10 years, until browsers in general get reinvented.
Why .jp2??? Why not .jpeg2. This legacy DOS naming convention drives me nuts. Not even Windows is crappy enough to still require 8.3 filenames.
I still cringe when I see default.htm. It's a frickin' html file, name it properly.
-Ben
The JPEG standard compresses image files which are then transmitted across the web faster than uncompressed files.
excellent, using jpeg2000 increases my bandwidth too!
There I was thinking they downloaded at the same speed but in less time!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't want to be a nay-sayer in any way, but I predict that this will catch on about as quickly as PNGs replacing GIFs. Most professional quality sites still use GIFs instead of PNG, even though tools such as Adobe's Imageready and Macromedia's Fireworks have supported the PNG format alongside GIFs for a while now AND most major browsers support PNGs natively (which wasn't the case not too long ago, with IE4, I believe).
.jp2 format doesn't require a plugin for 99% of the browsers out there, it won't be widely used, IMHO. Of course, I could be wrong and the .jp2 format might not even be meant for wide-spread adoption, and mainly for particular niche uses (such as viewing hubble images or replacing the need for lossless TIFFs).
Until the
Just my $0.02.
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.
JPEG does support a lossless mode, it's just that no one uses it. To paraphrase, JPEG supports a lossless spatial algorithm that operates in the pixel domain. Some amount of prediction is used, resulting in about 2:1 compression, but the error terms for the predictions are included in the data stream (encoded using either Huffman or arithmetic coding), resulting in no net errors.
What's a lot more exciting is JPEG2000's use of wavelet compression, which isn't mentioned at all.
About time! JPEG 2000 was mentioned in Electronic Engineering Times many years ago. The next revision of Artwalker.com (where you explore the world though landscape paintings) will be completely displayed using JP2 because it has one vital characteristic: Images can be scaled in real time (via the server). For example, instead of displaying a thumbnail of say 50x60 pixels, and having the user click the thumbnail to view the full size image (say, 640x480), a JP2 image can be made to display as a percentage of the total size of the display window (or browser width) in a similar fashion to a vector graphic, such as that generated by Flash. This will be excellent for mobile devices with differing screen resolutions and make for some very cool ZOOM tools on browsers and in Photoshop etc. We have been waiting for this since 1996, when we launched Artwalker! Soon it will be time to get going on converting all our high resolution images to JP2. A lot of work!
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
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?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
...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.
I thought this was a good comparasion between JPEG and JPEG2000.
I remember a similar promise made about LZW compression in the GIF standard by Compuserve. What is to stop these companies from requiring license fees at some arbitrary point in the future once the technology is widely used?
Additionally, there doesn't seem to be very much due dilligence performed in regards to other patents over the techniques utilized in the standard. Even if all of the known patents are licensed royalty-free, there exists the very real possiblity that a submarine patent will be exposed, after the standard is widely utilized, of course.
Of course, this won't matter once all of our PCs are replaced with sealed, SSSCA-compliant, government issued "convergence appliances"... :-)
I've been involved in JPEG 2000 for a while now, and come to the conclusion that..
:).
:) karma in offtopics.
A) It's an excellent codec, though computationally heavy
B) The design of the codestream along with JP2/JPX file format has a lot of potential to create a "new" type of image that isn't just a picture. Yes, you've heard this before, but this time it's built in at a codec level. In stream ROI's, very flexible reconstruction and compression controllable through great numbers of options - and that's only the codec (at a *very* rudimentary level
C) It won't succeed without a decent opensource, "IPR free" (as much as is possible) implementation.
D) Read C again. It's important
To this end, I've started (with support from others in the JPEG 2000 community), a JPEG 2000 Group (See http://www.j2g.org - It's very sparse at the moment, but if you're interested, bookmark it and come back in about a month). Tom Lane and IGJ have expressed no interested in JPEG2000, for various reasons (which I don't entirely disagree with, but I'd rather be proactive and try to correct flaws than walk away totally).
The aims of the JPEG 2000 Group are to create a public, open source (probably BSD license) implementation of "Part 1" (This is the codestream syntax, codec, and file format wrapper). We'll also provide a community JPEG 2000 resource. To facilitate this, we've already attained a Class C liaison with the committee. This grants all members the option of acquiring the standard free of charge. We also get a minimal channel back into the process to give opinions.
The point of this ever rambling post is this : We need members. The standard is large, and the support around it will be larger. We need volunteers who would be interested in assisting in the creation of the codec. Sadly, "Membership" is going to require some form of contribution and commitment to acquire copies of the texts you'll need - I hate this as much as you, but it was accept it, or don't get any copies at all (without $$$). If you're interested in contributing in any way (code, documents, testing, support), please drop by the at forum - Even if its only a passing interest, I'd be happy to go into more detail regarding the project (or just JPEG 2000 itself). I'd do it here, but I'd loose all my (low
So, rather than bitch about the lack of a free implementation and how late it is, and how it'll never get used, come and help out! You know you (might possibly | maybe | someday) want to!
Everyone is still using old formats like GIF and JPEG.
But there are other, more powerful formats.
For a non-descructive compression, the PNG format is fortunately getting more and more popular, although the late inclusion in Internet Explorer slows down its wide adoption.
But when it comes to a destructive compression, there's an excellent (and not new) format made by AT&T and called DjVu. It was one of the first wavelets-based format.
DjVu is really better than Jpeg. Images are better looking (more contrast, less pixels with odd colors), and files are way smaller. Plus you can smoothly zoom any DjVu image without getting big and ugly blocks.
DjVu has been available for a while as a plugin for common browsers.
There's a 100% free implementation of the format called DjVuLibre .
However, nobody uses it. I don't understand why. Some times ago, it may have been because compression was slow. But nowadays, it's no more a valid point.
People are enthusiast for Jpeg2000. But why would Jpeg2000 be adopted while DjVu has never been?
{{.sig}}
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."
All that said, I don't see the JPEG2k standard really succeeding--now that more and more users are getting faster and faster connections, there's not that much need for the smaller filesizes.
However, at the same time that endusers are getting faster connections, more and more webmasters are starting to feel the very real pain of bandwidth costs. I think the adoption of smaller image formats will come more from their side.
If jpeg2000 makes enough of a difference, I can see at least a very large percentage of graphics oriented sites switching - almost forcing the users to follow suit.
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.
I thought this was a good comparasion between JPEG and JPEG2000.
Good one. Thanks for the link.
Looks like JPEG2000 finally got things right for the human eye:
- Higher compression ratios just gently blur details, rather than creating artifacts. Losing the extra information leaves the part that DID get through intact.
- The text says the compression allows for progressive downloading. This implies that the coding scheme does something like working upward in spatial frequency - encoding the basic stuff first then sending progressively finer deltas. For a given compression ratio just stop the downloading (or file saving) when you have enough.
- The compression seems to match eye processing so well that highly compressed (100:1) images actually look BETTER than the basic image. The features important to the eye (facial stuff, especially eyes) gets through or even enhanced, while unnecessary detail - including sampling artifacts - gets selectively blurred out. Something like the soft-focus filter in portrait photography. The only thing in the samples that got noticably worse at high-compression is hair, which just gets a bit blurry. (Meanwhile, JPEG looked like it had pixelated measles.)
Of course the images selected for the demo could have been optimized for the compression scheme. B-)
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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
A few characters per file name - yes those couple of bytes will save gobs of bandwidth.
2. Easier to type.
How often do you actually type file names? I do it once - when I create the file, I think I can afford the few seconds.
3. Backward compatability.
With what??? I am willing to bet that whatever you dig up that requires 8.3 will not be compatible with the actual file format.
I cringe when I see people have named the file some big long gobbledegook like bobbys_8th_book_report.doc when bookrep8.doc would have done just fine.
Yes, that's a stupid name, and no bookrep8.doc is not better. Who numbers their bloody book reports? I think little bobby will get a bit confused a few years down the road when he gets to bookrp48.doc How about "steppenwolf report.doc"? or "glass bead game report.doc", I really do think I see how these are better than stpwlfrp.doc and glbegarp.doc
sic transit gloria mundi
LuraTech has been shipping a JPEG 2000 broswer plugin (and Photoshop plugin) for a while. I've had problems with their jp2 file format. It's a new and very complex standard so expect some startup pains. http://www.luratech.de/index_e.html
Dr. David Taubman was one of the authors of the JPEG 2000 spec. His book on JPEG 2000 is now available. He has also released a very nice SDK for compressing, decompressing, manipulating and streaming JPEG 2000. It's called Kakadu and you can read more at http://www.kakadusoftware.com/. The source code for Kakadu is packaged with the book. There are demo images and software at this site also.
You have an interesting point--bandwidth is getting more dear, now that the pyramid-scheme banner advertising revenue outfits have been going tits-up. However, I just don't see most website owners risking their livelihoods by implementing an image format which most of their customers, plugins or no, may not be able to read--particularly since so much of web layout is done using images these days instead of text.
Think about it--how many users are set to automatically download plugins as needed? Almost none because of security reasons. herefore, some active decision is needed on behalf of the user to actually install the plugin or not. What will be the user's reaction if he goes to the site of WidgetCo, doesn't know what to do with this dialogue box about installing stuff (especially if he's been told be friends or company that installing strange software can be dangerous, or if he's been molested by the likes of CometCursor), says "No", and gets a page of big X's where all the buttons and banners should be? Well, it might well be to go to the site of WidgetBiz instead to get his widgets there.
This is why I really don't see JPEG2k taking off. It's a risk most companies won't take--you don't want your users not being able to use your site. Look how long it took Flash to become as common as it is today--many years, and then only because it started shipping by default with Windows.
I have no doubt that IE7 will have JPEG2k support--poor and half-hearted support. As with most Microsoft products it'll probably take the until the second major release to get it right, so let's say IE8 will have fully implemented JPEG2k support out-of-the-box. How many years will it be until that's out? And how much further along will available bandwidth be by then?
I could well be wrong, but I just don't see this taking off. Unlike Flash did, it doesn't bring anything spectacularly new to the table--a few people have been talking about the visual effects you can get using wavelet images, but those same effects are common (if poorly implemented) Flash effects today, in addition to the many other effects Flash does. So that leaves us with the better compression over JPEG as its big marketing point...and I just don't see that being enough to get website owners to risk alienating end users. So *at least* until great JPEG2k support ships with IE out of the box, and that version of IE is common, I don't see JPEG2k going anywhere except into some niche markets.
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"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
SVG is the most fantastic vector based graphics format ever created. Not only is it fully scalable to what ever size you care to scale it to, but it's all done in XML, which means scripting graphics creation is nigh on basic.
Since SVG is basically text, the file sizes are tiny! Add to this the fact that svgz (gzipped svgs) are part of the svg standard, and you end up being able to create fully interactive vector based animations weighing in at less than 1K (try this -it's a perfect example of how cool SVG is)
As it stands now, SVG can only be viewed on IE and NS4 with a plug-in, but Mozilla supports it natively if you enable it ;) It's a more important standard to propergate than JP2 IMHO.
On the PNG front: PNG is so much better than any other format for layout graphics on web pages. It's alpha tranparency and colour pallet is all you need (it runs circles around GIF). PNGs should be the internet standard for non vector graphics, but alas, IE does not render them properly (the colours get twisted and changed as far as I've experienced). If MS could stick to standards, it'd make the internet a whole lot better.
Anyway, in conclusion, JP2 may sound nice, but there are much more important formats out there that need to be adopted before JP2, which will not only cut down the transfer sizes of graphics, but make web development just that much easier for people like me.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
I hope they have added a metadata section where data like author, date, etc could be attached internally to the image.
I always thought it would be cool if your digital camera could include the settings (fstop, exposure time, ISO, etc, compression ratio) along with data, time and author directly in the image file.
Here's a summary of the jpeg2000 situation that I wrote up, but never made it into bugzilla:
SVG is a good vector format for the arena it was designed to serve (primarily, the web). For other uses, the text based markup is a tad bloated, and the fact that it's easily scriptable isn't a factor. It's not perfect, but the web needs a good, open vector graphics format, and SVG is a well designed option, in most ways. I just wish they'd get the fonts right. Of course, Flash has been providing web based vector graphics for ages. It's just that it was always aimed at presentation, and didn't take into account accessibility, searching, consistency of navigation and all the other things that we should expect a vector format to provide. In that respect, SVG is a significant step forward, and I hope it starts to gain widespread acceptance soon. But with even Mozilla not supporting it in many of the standard builds, it has a way to go before that stage.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks