Tag Archives: JPEG2000

New developments in JPEG

A report from the 69th meeting of the JPEG Committee, held in Warsaw in June, mentions several recent initiatives. The descriptions have a rather high buzzword-to-content ratio, but here’s my best interpretation of what I think they mean. What’s usually called “JPEG” is one of several file formats supported by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, and JFIF would be a more precise name. Not every format name that starts with JPEG refers to “JPEG” files, but if I refer to JPEG without further qualification here, it means the familiar format.
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JPEG2000 thumbnails

I’ve been trying to find software for batch generation of thumbnails for JPEG2000 images. So far this is what I’ve looked at:

Kakadu is commercial software that looked hopeful at first, but the licensing is confusing. The description of the “Non-commercial, Named User Licence” says it “can only be purchased by individuals, Academic Institutions, not-for-profit organizations and libraries which do not gain financially by using this software,” but the license itself doesn’t say anything about licensing to institutions, only individuals. Our attempts to get a clarification have gotten no response. If they ignore us when we want to buy something, that doesn’t bode well for support.

OpenJPEG has its supporters, but it has a command line API which can’t create JPEG, GIF, or PNG, and it can’t create images of a specified size. There are C functions which may or may not be directly callable, but the documentation for them is really scanty.

ImageMagick didn’t seem appealing at first because of its command-line orientation, but it may be the best option. JMagick provides a JNI connection. The documentation indicates it can generate images of a specified size and format, which is what we need.

If anybody reading this has other suggestions, let me know.

JPEG 2000 summit presentations

Presentations from May’s JPEG2000 Summit are now available online.