JPEG 2000 - Technical Discussion

Technical Discussion

The aim of JPEG 2000 is not only improving compression performance over JPEG but also adding (or improving) features such as scalability and editability. JPEG 2000's improvement in compression performance relative to the original JPEG standard is actually rather modest and should not ordinarily be the primary consideration for evaluating the design. Very low and very high compression rates are supported in JPEG 2000. The ability of the design to handle a very large range of effective bit rates is one of the strengths of JPEG 2000. For example, to reduce the number of bits for a picture below a certain amount, the advisable thing to do with the first JPEG standard is to reduce the resolution of the input image before encoding it. That is unnecessary when using JPEG 2000, because JPEG 2000 already does this automatically through its multiresolution decomposition structure. The following sections describe the algorithm of JPEG 2000.