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
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