Aware, Inc. Announces JPEG 2000 Compliant Image Compression Software Products; The Benefits of Wavelet Compression in a New ISO/ITU Standard
BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 8, 2001--Aware, Inc., a pioneer in wavelet based image and data compression technology, today announced a fully featured and fully compliant software implementation of the new ISO/ITU still image compression standard, JPEG 2000.
"As an approved international standard, JPEG 2000 eliminates problems associated with incorporating proprietary compression and file formats into a system. The benefits of wavelet based image compression are now available to a much larger population of users and systems," said Robert Mungovan, vice president of Aware's compression group.
The JPEG 2000 standard, approved in January 2001, provides file sizes that are 40-60% smaller than traditional JPEG images. The new standard also provides lossy and lossless modes and progressive encoding/decoding by resolution, fidelity, region of interest and color component. It includes error resilience for noisy channels.
The layered file format can eliminate the need to maintain several different resolution versions of the same image in a database. Images of smaller dimensions can be extracted from a single JPEG 2000 compressed file. Additionally, the new layered file format is better suited to streaming still frames over the Internet. A browser can display the image more quickly because the whole compressed file does not have to be received to display a version of the image. As the browser receives more of the file, a higher fidelity or higher resolution version of the image will be displayed.
Continuing, Mr. Mungovan said, "Wavelet based image compression has been recognized as better than JPEG since the late 1980s because it yields smaller file sizes or higher fidelity images. Aware has a successful track record of providing wavelet compression technology and software into niche markets where image fidelity is of tantamount importance."
Aware's JPEG 2000 software offering includes:
--a software development kit with a flexible application programming interface and example utilities with source code;
--a web solution with browser plugins for Netscape, Internet Explorer and Pocket IE that take advantage of the standard;
--a "smart reformatter" which converts most existing file types to JPEG 2000 format and provides conversion between the different JPEG 2000 encoding schemes (resolution, quality, region of interest, lossy/lossless).
Aware will demonstrate a "smart card" version of JPEG 2000 at CardTech/SecureTech in Las Vegas (Aware Booth #2837), May 15-17. The Aware demonstration will illustrate how a full resolution 24-bit ID card photo can be compressed to a file size of 1-2 Kbytes in JPEG 2000 standard compliant format. The demonstration will also show how the images can be efficiently streamed to a wireless handheld computer, and then displayed, zoomed, panned and scrolled. |
