JasPer is a project to create a reference implementation of the codec specified in the JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard, (ie. ISO/IEC 15444-1). The project was started in 1997 by Image Power Inc. and the University of British Columbia

University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia is a public research university. UBC’s two main campuses are situated in Vancouver and in Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley...

. It consists of a C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 library and some sample applications useful for testing the codec.

The license was changed in early 2004 to an MIT License

MIT License

The MIT License is a free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . It is a permissive license, meaning that it permits reuse within proprietary software provided all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms...

-style one, in response to requests from the open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 community. It is now used as a component of many software projects, both free and proprietary, including (but not limited to) netpbm

Netpbm

Netpbm is an open source package of graphics programs and a programming library, used mainly in the Unix world. It is a highly portable package, working under many Unix platforms, Windows, Mac OS X, VMS, Amiga OS and others and is included in all major open source Unix-like operating system...

 (as of release 10.12), ImageMagick

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is an open source software suite for displaying, converting, and editing raster image files. It can read and write over 100 image file formats. ImageMagick is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.- Features and capabilities:...

 and KDE

KDE

KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...

 (as of version 3.2). As of June 22, 2010, GEGL

GEGL

The Generic Graphics Library is a programming library under development for image processing applications. It is mainly developed for GIMP in order to bring support for higher bit depth images than GIMP currently supports, as well as non-destructive editing...

 graphics library has supported JasPer in its latest Git

Git (software)

Git is a distributed revision control system with an emphasis on speed. Git was initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on...

 versions.

In a series of objective JPEG2000 compression quality tests conducted in 2004, "JasPer was the best codec, closely followed by IrfanView

IrfanView

IrfanView is a freeware/shareware image viewer for Microsoft Windows that can view, edit, and convert image files and play video/audio files. It is noted for its small size, speed, ease of use, and ability to handle a wide variety of graphic file formats, and has some image creation and painting...

 and Kakadu

Kakadu (software)

Kakadu is a closed-source library to encode and decode JPEG 2000 images. It implements the ISO/IEC 15444-1 standard fully in part 1, and partly in parts 2-3. It is developed by David Taubman from University of New South Wales , Australia...

."

External links

• JasPer homepage, University of Victoria