Imaging Experts

The Advantage of a Single Code Base

One of the questions I am often asked is how we manage to build, test and support our SDKs and Libraries for so many platforms. When we started this company, we made a commitment to permit developers to build applications that incorporate high-performance imaging capabilities without sacrificing features or functions because of platform. To a great extent, we continue to fulfill this commitment today across our entire family of RasterMaster products for Windows, .NET, Java, UNIX and Macintosh.

Our ability to perform this feat is based on our unique architecture and design. We create our Libraries with portability in mind. One of the key factors is that we port each RasterMaster starting from a single Library. Because we develop in-house from a single Library, most important features can be implemented and ported quickly and easily across all of our SDKs and to any of our other applications that leverage our Library. This also insures greater reliability and consistency among all our products.

I'd like to re-affirm our commitment to developing products in a rational and studied manner, ensuring that we provide you with the functionality you need on the platform you require. This commitment sets Snowbound apart as a leader in the imaging industry. I invite you to visit our website and take a look at the latest enhancements to our RasterMaster imaging SDKs.

-Simon

JBIG2 Compression

JBIG2 how do I love thee, let me count the ways. Why do I love JBIG2 so much? 

Well lets start out by backtracking a little. After 23 years in the imaging business I have seen a number of new file formats and compression algorithms. Remember FlashPix?  (just thought I'd throw that in for laughs) They are announced with all kinds of incredible claims like100 times better than JPEG or Group 4. Whether true or not (rarely true), they are in most cases a proprietary file format owned by one company. Therefore viewers are hard to find and wide spread adoption is rare. Also if the one single source goes out of business you have no way of converting the images you are left with.

Enter JBIG2. JBIG2 an ISO standard T.84 and a specification is publicly available. So what, you say.  Here's the best part. JBIG2 is supported by PDF as a compression filter. This means you can create a JBIG2 compressed PDF file and any one with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or greater can view the image. So most desktops already have a JBIG2 viewer installed.

Oh yeah by the way it does compress well. I have found JBIG2 to compress 7 times better than Group 4 compression. An image uncompressed 1 meg was compressed in Tiff group 4 to 82k. JBIG2 was able to compress down to 12k.

If you must know JBIG2 creates a symbol table. Usually text characters in the image. After the table is built redundant symbols can be eliminated. This can be done be creating a tolerance for lossy compression or exact for lossless compression.

-Jim

JPEG2000 Compression

JPEG2000 oh where oh where have you been. The JPEG2000 specification, as the name denotes, has been released for 5 years now, but the use of this compression is rare. Why? Lets first step back.  JPEG2000 does work and work well. It can compress on the order of 3 - 5 times better than ANSI base line JPEG. The images are much clearer. Due to the nature of the algorithm you don't get the "blockiness" type attributes as in JPEG for higher compressed images. The spec also contains other levels that allow for mixed content. Mixed content are images types with text and or color images and graphics. Also there exists a lossless mode. So if its so great why has it not gone mainstream yet. Well this is what blogs are for, my opinion.

When JPEG hit there did not exist any good color compression. LZW or Flate (.zip or PNG) compression only yielded about 2 - 3 to one compression. There was truly a need for good mainstream color and gray scale compression. The independent JPEG group was formed and provided free source code. This code was portable to most other platforms. The browsers quickly adopted JPEG. Soon every desktop had a JPEG viewer. Other companies could easily integrate JPEG compression and decompression due to the free source code.

JPEG2000 on the other hand has not been adopted in Internet Explorer or any of the other browsers (as far as I know?). There currently exists no JPEG2000 free source. Mass storage is cheap and gets cheaper every year. JPEG2000 viewers are far and few between. They may exist but you don't get a free one with Windows operating systems, Macintosh or Unix. 

The integration of JPEG2000 by the browsers and free reference source code could spur rapid adoption but is the current JPEG already good enough? Maybe for mass storage but for internet download times JPEG2000 would be nice.

So what do you think? Do we need JPEG2000. Is better compression needed?

-Jim