Released on: February 20, 2008, 2:22 am

Press Release Author: Digital Preservation Coalition

Industry: Computers

Press Release Summary: The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has examined JPEG
2000 in a report published today,
www.dpconline.org/graphics/reports/index.html#jpeg2000.
The report concludes that JPEG 2000 represents a great stride forward for the
archival community. The format now allows for greater compression rates and a
recompression rate that is visually lossless.


Press Release Body: The findings come as the Digital Preservation Coalition launch
its latest 'Technology Watch Report' written by Dr. Robert Buckley, a research
fellow with Xerox 'JPEG 2000 - a practical digital preservation standard?'. The
report looks in-depth at the new format and the challenges it has to cope with.
JPEG 2000 is widely used to collect and distribute a variety of images from
geospatial, medical imaging, digital cinema, and image repositories to networked
images. Interest in JPEG 2000 is now growing in the archival and library sectors, as
institutions look for more efficient formats to store the results of major
digitisation programmes.

The report is aimed at organisations involved in the management and storage of
digital information. The in-depth report will help archives, libraries and other
institutions make informed decisions about JPEG 2000 format and their future storage
needs.

JPEG 2000 can reduce storage requirements by an order of magnitude compared to an
uncompressed TIFF file. Dr.Buckley says, "This new format has come at a time of
heightened awareness about the access to digital documents. Any format that can
assist archives and libraries to do this is welcome."

The format will also enable users to open as much of the file as they need at that
time. This means a viewer, for example, could open a gigapixel image almost
instantly. This is achieved by retrieving a decompressed low-resolution display
sized image from the JPEG 2000 codestream. Coupled with this, the users ability to
zoom, pan and rotate an image has been enhanced.

Adrian Brown, head of digital preservation, The National Archives said: "This is a
very timely addition to the DPC\'s Technology Watch Report series as many
organisations are themselves reviewing the JPEG2000 format. This concise,
comprehensive and clear guide will be of interest to practitioners across the
digital preservation community."

The report concludes that JPEG 2000 offers much more flexibility and features than
JPEG, but at the cost of greater complexity. It is however a great stride forward,
and of major significance for the information management community.


Web Site: http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/

Contact Details: For further information, see www.dpconline.org or contact Frances
Boyle, fb@dpconline.org