JPEG 2000 a Great Step Forward for the Archival Community
The Digital Preservation Coalition has examined JPEG 2000 in a report published today. 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.
The findings come as the Digital Preservation Coalition launch its latest ‘Technology Watch Report’ written by Dr. Robert Buckley, a research fellow with Zerox ‘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 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.
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.
Source: PRLog
