The coding of picture, audio, multimedia and hypermedia information
 

JPEG Related Activities

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) was established in 1987 as a working group of ISO/TC97/SC2/WG8, as a result of initiatives from the UK and other national standards bodies, under the Convenorship of Graham Hudson, BT.

Following a period of frenzied activity, involving 26 international meetings in the period up to July 1990, the first, and probably most important standard emerged - ISO/IEC 10918-1:1994.  The Joint in JPEG's title referred to the ISO  liaison with CCITT SG VIII (now ITU-T SG 16), who helped define the requirements for the standard, and also co-published the document as their Recommendation T.81.

JPEG has gone on to produce a wide range of standards, notably in three key groupings:

  • the original JPEG standard, ISO/IEC 10918, which is very widely used, notably for most photographic images in the Internet, and in digital cameras and other publishing standards, such as PDF
  • a low complexity lossless standard - JPEG-LS, ISO/IEC 14495 | ITU Rec. T.87, based on HP's LOCO proposals, and capable of better lossless and near-lossless compression than the original JPEG standard
  • JPEG2000 - ISO/IEC 15444 | ITU-T T.800 series.  This is a new series of standards based primarily on wavelet compression techniques, and offering a fully flexible architecture for handling digital images.  Standards within the group include a baseline encoder/decoder, an extensible XML-based file format, motion JPEG-2000 (as now adopted by the Digital Cinema Initiative for Digital Cinema, and extensions for handling sophisticated publishing, security, wireless, 3D, communications and other enhancements

Although the UK no longer chair the group, they have maintained an active involvement, with one UK member still acting as JPEG's webmaster and chair of the Historical Archive group within JPEG.  The Historical Archive was one of the first attempts to recognise the importance of maintaining standards documentation to historians, other standards groups, and the patent industry, and has led to many other initiatives in this field - for example within the International Multimedia and Telecommunications Council, IMTC.