Published in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 1103-1127, November 2000 THE JPEG2000 STILL IMAGE CODING SYSTEM: AN OVERVIEW Charilaos Christopoulos 1 Senior Member, IEEE, Athanassios Skodras 2 Senior Member, IEEE, and Touradj Ebrahimi 3 Member, IEEE 1 Media Lab, Ericsson Research Corporate Unit, Ericsson Radio Systems AB, S-16480 Stockholm, Sweden Email: charilaos.christopoulos@era.ericsson.se 2 Electronics Laboratory, University of Patras, GR-26110 Patras, Greece Email: skodras@cti.gr 3 Signal Processing Laboratory, EPFL, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Email: Touradj.Ebrahimi@epfl.ch Abstract -- With the increasing use of multimedia technologies, image compression requires higher performance as well as new features. To address this need in the specific area of still image encoding, a new standard is currently being developed, the JPEG2000. It is not only intended to provide rate-distortion and subjective image quality performance superior to existing standards, but also to provide features and functionalities that current standards can either not address efficiently or in many cases cannot address at all. Lossless and lossy compression, embedded lossy to lossless coding, progressive transmission by pixel accuracy and by resolution, robustness to the presence of bit-errors and region-of-interest coding, are some representative features. It is interesting to note that JPEG2000 is being designed to address the requirements of a diversity of applications, e.g. Internet, color facsimile, printing, scanning, digital photography, remote sensing, mobile applications, medical imagery, digital library and E-commerce. Keywords -- JPEG, JPEG2000, color image coding, data compression, source coding, subband coding, wavelet transform. I. INTRODUCTION Since the mid-80s, members from both the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) have been working together to establish a joint international standard for the compression of grayscale and color still images. This effort has been known as JPEG, the Joint Photographic Experts Group the “joint” in JPEG refers to the collaboration between ITU and ISO). Officially, JPEG corresponds to the ISO/IEC international standard 10928-1, digital compression and coding of continuous-tone (multilevel) still images or to the ITU-T Recommendation T.81. The text in both these ISO and ITU-T documents is identical. The process was such that, after evaluating a number of coding schemes, the JPEG members selected a DCT 1 -based method in 1988. From 1988 to 1990, the JPEG group continued its work by simulating, testing and documenting the algorithm. JPEG became a Draft International Standard (DIS) in 1991 and an International Standard (IS) in 1992 [1-3]. With the continual expansion of multimedia and Internet applications, the needs and requirements of the technologies used, grew and evolved. In March 1997 a new call for contributions were launched for the development of a new standard for the compression of still images, the JPEG2000 [4,5]. This project, JTC 2 1.29.14 (15444), was intended to create a new image coding system for different types of still images (bi-level, gray-level, color, multi-component), 1 DCT stands for Discrete Cosine Transform 2 JTC stands for Joint Technical Committee