An Analytical Study of JPEG 2000 Functionalities

JPEG 2000, the new ISO/ITU-T standard for still image coding, is about to be finished. Other new standards have been recently introduced, namely JPEG-LS and MPEG-4 VTC. This paper compares the set of features offered by JPEG 2000, and how well they are fulfilled, versus JPEG-LS and MPEG-4 VTC, as well as the older but widely used JPEG and more recent PNG. The study concentrates on the set of supported features, although lossless and lossy progressive compression efficiency results are also reported. Each standard, and the principles of the algorithms behind them, are also briefly described. As the results show, JPEG 2000 supports the widest set of features among the evaluated standards, while providing superior rate-distortion performance.