It has been years since I’ve done meaningful work with JPEG2000, but I still try to keep tabs on what is happening in that community. In that vein, Rob Buckley — formerly of Xerox Research and now on his own with a consulting business — pointed me to an announcement about a JPEG2000 Summit happening at the Library of Congress next month.

The plan for the meeting is:

The program starts with a half-day tutorial on JPEG 2000 on the morning of the first day, followed by two sessions of presentations. The program will conclude on the afternoon of the second day with a small invitation-only working session to identify key objectives and collaborations for broadening the understanding and use of the technology.

Registration is free but required because of the limited space. If I were in or near D.C., I’d surely be there but my day job doesn’t align well enough to the agenda to justify the trip. I continue to think that use of JPEG2000 is a significant enough upgrade to TIFF practices for archiving and presentation to justify the cost of making a transition. (That statement says nothing about a wholesale conversion of archive TIFFs to JPEG2000s; existing TIFFs can stay as they are but current practice should take advantage of the features offered with JPEG2000.) The organizers are ending the summit with “a small invitation-only working session to identify key objectives and collaborations for broadening the understanding and use of the technology.” I’m looking forward to the output of that working group.

Earlier this month, the JPEG 2000 Implementation Working Group, the Wellcome Trust Library, and the U.K. Digital Preservation Coalition hosted a free one-day seminar called JPEG2000 for the Practitioner. The presentation slides are now linked to the seminar program and is a short report of the event by Christy Henshaw of Wellcome Library. The presentation slides by themselves carry a great deal of depth even without a recording of the audio. In particular I can recommend “What did JPEG 2000 ever do for us?” by Simon Tanner and “JPEG 2000 standardization – a pragmatic viewpoint” by Richard Clark. As brief introductions to where we’ve been with JPEG 2000 and where we could go.

Hat tip to Ron Murray for pointing this out to me.

Today at IBC2009 Fast Forward Video (FFV) announced the launch of the JPEG2000 Alliance, “a consortium of broadcast industry leaders dedicated to ensuring that JPEG2000 continues to develop into a leading compression standard.” According to the press release:

In addition to developing their own JPEG2000 technologies and products, these companies will collaborate to ensure widespread acceptance, deployment, and support of the compression standard for the benefit of the media and video industries. Activities will be centered on educating and creating awareness about the benefits of JPEG2000, promoting interoperability between standards and system devices, and promoting the development of tools by members and industry peers.

In addition to FFV, charter members of the JPEG2000 Alliance include 360 Systems, Analog Devices, Barco, Digital Rapids, Doremi Labs, the Fraunhofer Institute, Front Porch Digital, intoPIX, Media Links, Media Matters and Miranda Technologies. I’m taking the time to post this (and I’m hoping you are taking the time to read it) to give a sense of how JPEG2000 is being used outside the cultural heritage community.

I’m not sure what “IBC” stands for (their website doesn’t expand the acronym), but according to their “about” page they are “the leading international forum for the electronic media industry.” Based on the nature of the six partners behind the IBC (International Association of Broadcasting Manufacturers, Institution of Engineering and Technology, IEEE Broadcast Technology Society, Royal Television Society, Society of Cable Telecommunication Engineers, and Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers), it seems to be geared towards broadcast media. There is a conference going now in Amsterdam where they expect to have over 49,000 attendees and 1,300 exhibitors.

Although my day-to-day work takes me farther away from working with digital collections in general and JPEG2000 specifically, I still have a Google News search set up looking for hits on JPEG2000 topics. An entry appeared yesterday that gives some interesting insight into how motion JPEG2000 is being used in broadcast video transmission: “HBO Opens T-VIPS Video Gateways: Norweigan Vendor Helps Premium Net Ship Content Coast to Coast”

The article describes how HBO is using video gateways based on the JPEG2000 standard “to transport high-definition programming from its New York City studios to the HBO Communications Center.” The device, a TVG430 HD JPEG2000, encodes and decodes HDTV signals in motion JPEG2000 for transmission over gigabit ethernet. (Take a look at the data sheet [PDF] for all of the fine details about the product.) The article also describes some of the operational advantages and disadvantages of real-time motion JPEG2000 transmission:

For HBO and other clients, JPEG2000 has proven to have a number of advantages over MPEG formats for video-signal transport, Dolvik said. MPEG signals that are repeatedly encoded and decoded have much poorer image quality than JPEG2000 signals, and JPEG2000 does a significantly better job of error correction. In addition, the latency for JPEG2000 signals is about 120 milliseconds, compared with as much as two to four seconds for MPEG.

A downside to JPEG2000 is that it requires significantly more bandwidth than MPEG. This isn’t a major problem for sending content over IP networks, in which bandwidth has become much less expensive, but it is a significant issue for “the last mile” connection into homes where bandwidth is often extremely limited.

Very interesting to read, even if it doesn’t have a direct impact on libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. It does show, though, that JPEG2000 is gaining market share and mind share in other fields.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.t-vips.com/sites/default/files/datasheets/0409_Datasheet_tvg430.pdf to http://www.t-vips.com/sites/default/files/datasheets/Datasheet_tvg430.pdf on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.t-vips.com/sites/default/files/datasheets/Datasheet_tvg430.pdf on June 9th, 2011.

The lead article in the September/October issue of D-Lib Magazine release yesterday is on djatoka, the open source JPEG2000 Image Server from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The authors, Ryan Chute and Herbert Van de Sompel describe their effort in the article abstract:

The ISO-standardized JPEG 2000 image format has started to attract significant attention. Support for the format is emerging in major consumer applications, and the cultural heritage community seriously considers it a viable format for digital preservation. So far, only commercial image servers with JPEG 2000 support have been available. They come with significant license fees and typically provide the customers with limited extensibility capabilities. Here, we introduce djatoka, an open source JPEG 2000 image server with an attractive basic feature set, and extensibility under control of the community of implementers. We describe djatoka, and point at demonstrations that feature digitized images of marvelous historical manuscripts from the collections of the British Library and the University of Ghent. We also call upon the community to engage in further development of djatoka.

The article is very easy to read and is a great overview of how they built the djatoka image server. LANL has a demonstration site with images of the Magna Carta from the British Library. The University of Ghent has also deployed a djatoka installation with some digitized pages of a Gregorian choir book. (The text of the site is in Dutch, I think, but you can click on the square boxes to the right of “Fol.” to bring up the images.) LANL has also put together a screencast demonstration of djatoka, included below.

djatoka is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The software has a site on SourceForge with forums for discussion. It runs as a Java servlet, so it is pretty much cross-platform. In the image server is the Kakadu JPEG2000 toolkit and the IIPImage JavaScript Viewer toolkit. One other key piece is a fascinating use of an OpenURL ContextObject to carry the service request information from the browser through the image server to the caching and rendering pieces.

Congratulations and kudos to Ryan, Herbert, and the team at LANL for putting together this great piece of software and releasing it as open source.Ryan Chute, Herbert Van de Sompel (2008). Introducing djatoka: A Reuse Friendly, Open Source JPEG 2000 Image Server D-Lib Magazine, 14 (9/10) DOI: 10.1045/september2008-chute

David Lowe, Preservation Librarian at the University of Connecticut, is coordinating a survey of JPEG2000 use for digital imagery. The survey asks questions about the use of the JPEG2000 file format (for archival purposes or for access systems), tools used (both JPEG2000 toolkits and software that embeds JPEG2000 toolkits), and considerations of mathematically lossless versus visually lossless compression settings.

This is his announcement:

I am writing to solicit your help with a survey of library-related digital project staff regarding the implementation of the JPEG 2000 standard for digital images (specifically still images and not motion). We estimate that this task will take approximately 15 minutes of your time. It is available now at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=WXFAJwyRNZZilRWzrnum_2fw_3d_3d

The survey will remain active until October 31, 2008. Afterward, we will post the results via a report uploaded to our institutional repository, digitalcommons.uconn.edu.

Please note that in our report, personal information from the survey will not be revealed, and any comments used will remain unattributed unless the respondent prefers to be credited and indicates that desire in a separate email to me directly at david.lowe@uconn.edu.

Thank you for your help,

David Lowe
Preservation Librarian
UConn Libraries

I encourage you to take the survey as well.

Download iCal file

The JPEG2000 in Archives and Libraries Interest Group of the LITA division of ALA is pleased to present a program on Archiving in Practice with JPEG2000 on Sunday, June 29th from 8am to 10am in Ballroom E, Anaheim Convention Center.

The lead presentation will be given by Justin Dávila, Digital Media Workflow, Business and Technology consultant. The formal presentation will be followed an invitation to the audience to present five-minute lightning talks on the topic of JPEG2000 for cultural heritage archiving and access. More details can be found in the announcement on the j2kArcLib.info website.

Update

20080717T1338 : Slides from the presentation are posted on the ALA Presentations website.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://j2karclib.info/node/120 on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/jpeg2000/jk2kig.cfm on June 9th, 2011.

Thanks, Noel, and everyone else who made the video editions of Code4Lib 2008 presentations possible. I just had a chance to notice that the video from my JPEG2000 to Zoomify Shim lightning talk was online:

Some updates since the post and the presentation were first done. The code that exists in the source code repository now was refactored to use JJ2000 as part of the Sun ImageIO package. We were seeing non-threadsafe problems with Kakadu and thought that using the multithreaded ImageIO package would help. Unfortunately, even with extensive caching, it did not. My next task is to bring Kakadu back into the picture using the threadsafe JNI implementation that is part of the ImageIO-ext project to see if that helps.

Unfortunately, time ran out before this needed to go into initial production with the OhioLINK DRC roll-out, so it isn’t in production. The scheme shows promise, though, so I’m going to keep working with it…

The text was modified to update a link from http://jj2000.epfl.ch/ to http://code.google.com/p/jj2000/ on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to https://jai-imageio.dev.java.net/ on June 9th, 2011.

This is a textual representation of a lightning talk done on Feb 26th at Code4Lib 2008. When the video of the talk is up (thanks, Noel!) I’ll link it here, too. The video is now available, and that article includes an update on progress since the this article was posted.

OhioLINK has a collection of JPEG2000 images as an access format that were generated for use in our DLXS-based content system. We are in the process of migrating those collections to DSpace and were looking for a mechanism to leverage the existing JPEG2000 files and not have to generate new derivatives. We are also considering the use of JPEG2000 as a preservation format, and would find it attractive to use the same image format for both access copies and preservation copies. We looked at Zoomify, but to perform its scaling function it generates JPEG tiles at several resolutions and storing those tiles can triple or quadruple disk space requirements. Or, one could use the ‘enterprise’ version of Zoomify and its proprietary PFF format or the equally proprietary MrSID format. We didn’t want to be locked into either of these scenarios. Our solution is to create a web application that mimics the directory-of-JPEG-tiles solution, but to dynamically generate the tiles our of a JPEG2000 master.

The free version of Zoomify reads JPEG tiles out of a directory structure that looks like this:

The shim mimics that directory structure. It parses the URL of the request and dynamically creates the appropriate JPEG tile (or metadata file) out of the JPEG2000 image.

The Code

The source code is available from the OhioLINK DRC source code repository (Subversion access). We plan to integrate it into DSpace 1.5 as part of the Ohio Digital Resource Commons, and I may create a Fedora disseminator to serve up the tiles as well.

Thanks go out to Keith Gilbertson and John Davison on the OhioLINK staff for their help in making this work as well as Stu Hicks and François d’Erneville for being a sounding board for these ideas.

The text was modified to remove a link to https://drc-dev.ohiolink.edu/browser/j2kTileRenderer/trunk on January 13th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://code4lib/conference/2008 to http://code4lib.org/conference/2008 on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.kakadusoftware.com/Purchasing.html to http://www.kakadusoftware.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=19&vmcchk=1&Itemid=19 on January 28th, 2011.

Two items of recent note in the JPEG2000 world. The first is the announcement of “the world’s first fully integrated wireless HDTV” that uses JPEG2000 over the air:

The High Definition LCD TV, featuring Pulse~LINK’s integrated CWave® UWB Wireless HDMI technology, will be on display for the first time at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7-10. [...] With the integration of CWave® Wireless HDMI, digital display products can be mounted anywhere in the room without needing to run data cabling from the TV to the content source, such as a DVR, Blu-ray or HD DVD player, or a live cable or satellite feed. Video data is encoded using the JPEG2000 video codec, the same codec used by movie theaters for “Digital Cinema,” providing a secure high quality HD experience. Pulse-LINK’s Wireless HDMI solution is engineered to be equivalent in both content protection and visual experience to a wired HDMI connection.

Interesting that the initial take-up of JPEG2000 in consumer electronics may come from the video arena rather that the still image photography arena. (This announcement comes via a private communication with Ron Murray at LC.)

The second item is a paper in the February 2008 issue of Notices of AMS where David Austin explains how JPEG and JPEG2000 compress image data. It is a short (just over three pages) look at the compression algorithms from a mathematical point of view. (This comes via a posting in Entertaining Research.)

Update 20080108T1213 : Add to this now a posting by Jeff Mather that describes the various compression schemes and file formats that share the JPEG moniker. Do you think there is only one, or possibly two, “JPEG” standards. Read Jeff’s posting for an overview of everything that is out there.