JPEG XR (HD Photo) one step closer to standardization

Bill Crow is blogging again, in his post today he announces that JPEG XR is one step closer to international standardization. The specification is now frozen so there will not be any additional technical changes.

Here’s the excerpt from the press release discussing JPEG XR that Bill highlights;

JPEG XR is a new compression format supporting high dynamic range and promises to bring a new level of successful user experience to users of digital cameras. JPEG XR advanced to draft international standard balloting at the San Francisco meeting, entering the final phases of standardization and freezing the specification for implementers. The committee expects the JPEG XR International Standard (IS) to be published later this year. The JPEG committee is hosting a meeting to provide a special preview of the standard and discuss possible approaches to raw file compression. JPEG XR offers the potential to give cost and compression benefits to users producing high-quality, high dynamic-range images.

The complete press release from the meeting is here:  http://jpeg.org/newsrel24.html

For those not familiar with HD Photo there is a useful article on Wikipeda that explains the role of the format and the benefits that it brings.

HD Photo is an image codec that gives a high-dynamic-range image encoding while requiring only integer operations (with no divides) for both compression and decompression. It supports monochrome, RGB, CMYK and even n-channel color representation, using up to 16-bit unsigned integer representation, or up to 32-bit fixed point or floating point representation, and also supports RGBE (Radiance). It may optionally include an embedded ICC color profile, to achieve consistent color representation across multiple devices. An alpha channel may be present for transparency, and Exif and XMP metadata formats are supported. The format allows decoding part of an image, without decoding the entire image. Full decoding is also unnecessary for certain operations such as cropping, downsampling, horizontal or vertical flips, or cardinal rotations.

This is an exciting step for those with a keen interest in digital photography, especially fans of High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. There is existing support for HD Photo in Photoshop, Windows Vista and OS X.