JPEG XR is a still-image compression

Image compression

The objective of image compression is to reduce irrelevance and redundancy of the image data in order to be able to store or transmit data in an efficient form.- Lossy and lossless compression :...

 standard and file format for continuous tone

Continuous tone

A continuous tone image is one where each color at any point in the image is reproduced as a single tone, and not as discrete halftones, such as one single color for monochromatic prints, or a combination of halftones for color prints....

 photographic images, based on technology originally developed and patented by Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 under the name HD Photo (formerly Windows Media Photo). It supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is the preferred image format for Ecma-388 Open XML Paper Specification documents.

Support for the format is available in Adobe Flash Player

Adobe Flash Player

The Adobe Flash Player is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other...

 11.0, Adobe AIR 3.0, Windows Imaging Component

Windows Imaging Component

The Windows Imaging Component is a Component Object Model based imaging codec framework introduced in Windows Vista and Windows XP Service Pack 3 for working with and processing digital images and image metadata...

, .NET Framework

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...

 3.0, Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...

, Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9

Windows Internet Explorer 9 is the current version of the Internet Explorer web browser from Microsoft. It was released to the public on March 14, 2011 at 21:00 PDT. Internet Explorer 9 supports several CSS 3 properties, embedded ICC v2 or v4 color profiles support via Windows Color System, and...

, and a number of other products.

History

Microsoft first announced Windows Media Photo at WinHEC 2006, and then renamed it to HD Photo in November of that year. In July 2007, the Joint Photographic Experts Group

Joint Photographic Experts Group

The Joint Photographic Experts Group is the joint committee between ISO/IEC JTC1 and ITU-T that created the JPEG, JPEG 2000, and JPEG XR standards. It is one of two sub-groups of ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 29, Working Group 1 - titled as Coding of still pictures...

 and Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 announced HD Photo to be under consideration to become a JPEG standard known as JPEG XR. On 16 March 2009, JPEG XR was given final approval as ITU-T

ITU-T

The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector is one of the three sectors of the International Telecommunication Union ; it coordinates standards for telecommunications....

 Recommendation T.832 and starting in April 2009, it became available from the ITU-T in "pre-published" form. On 19 June 2009, it passed an ISO/IEC Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) ballot, resulting in final approval as International Standard

International Standard

The term International Standard may refer to*International standard*International Standard , a category of ballroom dance*International Standard Version, an English Bible translation....

 ISO/IEC 29199-2. The ITU-T updated its publication with a corrigendum approved in December 2009, and ISO/IEC issued a new edition with similar corrections on September 30, 2010.

In 2010, after completion of the image coding specification, the ITU-T and ISO/IEC also published a motion format specification (ITU-T T.833 | ISO/IEC 29199-3), a conformance test set (ITU-T T.834 | ISO/IEC 29199-4), and reference software (ITU-T T.835 | ISO/IEC 29199-5) for JPEG XR. In 2011, they published a technical report describing the workflow architecture for the use of JPEG XR images in applications (ITU-T T.Sup2 | ISO/IEC TR 29199-1).

Capabilities

JPEG XR is an image file format that offers several key improvements over JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

, including:

Better compression:

JPEG XR file format supports higher compression ratios in comparison to JPEG for encoding an image with equivalent quality.

Lossless compression:

JPEG XR also supports lossless compression. The signal processing steps in JPEG XR are the same for both lossless and lossy coding. This makes the lossless mode simple to support and enables the "trimming" of some bits from a lossless compressed image to produce a lossy compressed image.

Tile structure support:

A JPEG XR coded image can be segmented into tile regions. The data for each region can be decoded separately. This enables rapid access to parts of an image without needing to decode the entire image. When a type of tiling referred to as "soft tiling" is used, the tile region structuring can be changed without fully decoding the image and without introducing additional distortion.

Support for more color accuracy:

In image and graphics representations, the color associated with each point in the picture (called a pixel

Pixel

In digital imaging, a pixel, or pel, is a single point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable screen element in a display device; it is the smallest unit of picture that can be represented or controlled....

) is represented as a set of numbers. Each color can be expressed as a combination of numbers that each represent the intensity of one of the components of a color (known as the channel

Channel (digital image)

Color digital images are made of pixels, and pixels are made of combinations of primary colors. A channel in this context is the grayscale image of the same size as a color image, made of just one of these primary colors. For instance, an image from a standard digital camera will have a red, green...

) which consists of Red, Green and Blue (the three colors of light) color primary. Such a color scheme is called the RGB color model

RGB color model

The RGB color model is an additive color model in which red, green, and blue light is added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors...

. Using an alternative set of color primaries, graphic files may treat the color of each point as a combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (the four ink colors of printers) and therefore store the color of each point in four channels. Such a color scheme is called the CMYK color model

CMYK color model

The CMYK color model is a subtractive color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. CMYK refers to the four inks used in some color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key...

. When the image being stored contains only black, white and shades of gray as colors, the image may be represented using a single grayscale

Grayscale

In photography and computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample, that is, it carries only intensity information...

 channel for each pixel that only represents the intensity of the gray shade.

JPEG supports 24-Bit RGB (also known as truecolor): This representation stores each channel as an 8-bit number, an integer number between 0 to 255. In this case, the greater the number, the more intense the color component is. For instance, 25 in red channel represents dark red while 255 indicates fully vibrant red. This enables more than 16 million color possibilities. JPEG also supports 8-bit grayscale

Grayscale

In photography and computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample, that is, it carries only intensity information...

 scheme, so that each pixel can have one of 256 possible shades of gray.

Also supported is 15-Bit and 16-Bit RGB (also known as Highcolor), along with 30-Bit RGB.

JPEG XR adds supports for 48-bit integer RGB (also known as Deep Color): This representation stores the values of each of the three channels as a 16-bit number, an integer number between 0 to 65,535, where 0 denotes least intensity and 65535 the greatest. Therefore, each channel stores a much finer grade of intensity.

JPEG XR also supports 16-bit per component (64 bit per pixel) integer CMYK color model

CMYK color model

The CMYK color model is a subtractive color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. CMYK refers to the four inks used in some color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key...

.

16-bit and 32-bit fixed point color component codings are also supported in JPEG XR. In such encodings, the most-significant 4 bits of each color channel are treated as providing additional "headroom" and "toe room" beyond the range of values that represents the nominal black-to-white signal range.

Moreover, 16-bit and 32-bit floating point color component codings are also supported in JPEG XR. In these cases the image is interpreted as floating point data, although the JPEG XR encoding and decoding steps are all performed using only integer operations (to simplify the compression processing).

The shared-exponent floating point color format known as RGBE

RGBE image format

RGBE is an image format invented by Gregory Ward Larson. It stores pixels as one byte each for RGB values with a one byte shared exponent. Thus it stores four bytes per pixel....

 (Radiance

Radiance (software)

Radiance is a suite of tools for performing lighting simulation originally written by Greg Ward. It includes a renderer as well as many other tools for measuring the simulated light levels. It uses ray tracing to perform all lighting calculations, accelerated by the use of an octree data structure...

) is also supported, enabling more faithful storage of High Dynamic Range (HDR) images

High dynamic range imaging

In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods...

.

In addition to RGB and CMYK formats, JPEG XR also supports grayscale

Grayscale

In photography and computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample, that is, it carries only intensity information...

 and multi-channel

Channel (digital image)

Color digital images are made of pixels, and pixels are made of combinations of primary colors. A channel in this context is the grayscale image of the same size as a color image, made of just one of these primary colors. For instance, an image from a standard digital camera will have a red, green...

 color encodings with an arbitrary number of channels.

The color representations, in most cases, are transformed to an internal color representation. The transformation is entirely reversible, so that this color transformation step does not introduce distortion and lossless coding modes can be supported.

Transparency map support:

An alpha channel

Alpha compositing

In computer graphics, alpha compositing is the process of combining an image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render image elements in separate passes, and then combine the resulting multiple 2D images into a single, final image in a...

 may be present to represent transparency, so that alpha blending overlay capability is enabled.

Compressed-domain image modification:

In JPEG XR, full decoding of the image is unnecessary for converting an image from a lossless to lossy encoding, reducing the fidelity of a lossy encoding, or reducing the encoded image resolution.

Full decoding is also unnecessary for certain editing operations such as cropping, horizontal or vertical flips, or cardinal

Cardinal direction

The four cardinal directions or cardinal points are the directions of north, east, south, and west, commonly denoted by their initials: N, E, S, W. East and west are at right angles to north and south, with east being in the direction of rotation and west being directly opposite. Intermediate...

 rotations.

The tile structure for access to image regions can also be changed without full decoding and without introducing distortion.

Metadata support:

A JPEG XR image file may optionally contain an embedded ICC

International Color Consortium

The International Color Consortium was formed in 1993 by eight industry vendors in order to create a universal color management system that would function transparently across all operating systems and software packages....

 color profile, to achieve consistent color representation across multiple devices.

Exif and XMP

Extensible Metadata Platform

The Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform is a standard, created by Adobe Systems Inc., for processing and storing standardized and proprietary information relating to the contents of a file....

 metadata formats are also supported.

Container format

One file container format that can be used to store JPEG XR image data is specified in Annex A of the JPEG XR standard. It is a TIFF-like format using a table of Image File Directory (IFD) tags. An JPEG XR file contains image data, optional alpha channel data, metadata, optional XMP

Extensible Metadata Platform

The Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform is a standard, created by Adobe Systems Inc., for processing and storing standardized and proprietary information relating to the contents of a file....

 metadata stored as RDF/XML

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

, and optional Exif metadata, in IFD tags. The image data is a contiguous self-contained chunk of data. The optional alpha channel, if present, can be compressed as a separate image record, enabling decoding of the image data independently of transparency data in applications which do not support transparency. (Alternatively, JPEG XR also supports an "interleaved" alpha channel format in which the alpha channel data is encoded together with the other image data in a single compressed codestream.)

Being TIFF-based, this format inherits all of the limitations of the TIFF format including the 4 GB file-size limit.

New work has been started in the JPEG committee to enable the use of JPEG XR image coding within the JPX file storage format — enabling use of the JPIP protocol, which allows interactive browsing of networked images. Additionally, a Motion JPEG XR specification was approved as an ISO standard for motion (video) compression in March 2010.

Compression algorithm

JPEG XR's design is conceptually very similar to JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

: the source image is optionally converted to a luma-chroma

Luma (video)

In video, luma, sometimes called luminance, represents the brightness in an image . Luma is typically paired with chrominance. Luma represents the achromatic image without any color, while the chroma components represent the color information...

 colorspace, the chroma planes are optionally subsampled

Chroma subsampling

Chroma subsampling is the practice of encoding images by implementing less resolution for chroma information than for luma information, taking advantage of the human visual system's lower acuity for color differences than for luminance....

, each plane is divided into fixed-size blocks, the blocks are transformed into the frequency domain, and the frequency coefficients are quantized and entropy coded

Entropy encoding

In information theory an entropy encoding is a lossless data compression scheme that is independent of the specific characteristics of the medium....

. Major differences include the following:

• JPEG supports bit depths of 8 and 12 bits; JPEG XR supports bit depths of up to 32 bits. JPEG XR also supports lossless and lossy compression of floating-point image data (by representing the floating-point values in an IEEE 754-like format, and encoding them as though they were integers) and RGBE
  RGBE image format
  RGBE is an image format invented by Gregory Ward Larson. It stores pixels as one byte each for RGB values with a one byte shared exponent. Thus it stores four bytes per pixel....
  
   imagery.

• JFIF and other typical image encoding practices specify a linear transformation from RGB to YCbCr
  YCbCr
  YCbCr or Y′CbCr, sometimes written or , is a family of color spaces used as a part of the color image pipeline in video and digital photography systems. Y′ is the luma component and CB and CR are the blue-difference and red-difference chroma components...
  
  , which is slightly lossy in practice because of roundoff error. JPEG XR specifies a lossless colorspace transformation, given (for RGB) by

• While JPEG uses 8 × 8 blocks for its frequency transformation, JPEG XR primarily uses 4 × 4 block transforms. (2 × 4 and 2 × 2 transformations are also defined for special cases involving chroma subsampling
  Chroma subsampling
  Chroma subsampling is the practice of encoding images by implementing less resolution for chroma information than for luma information, taking advantage of the human visual system's lower acuity for color differences than for luminance....
  
  .)

• While JPEG uses a single transformation stage, JPEG XR applies its 4 × 4 core transform in a two-level hierarchical fashion within 16 × 16 macroblock regions. This gives the transform a wavelet
  Wavelet
  A wavelet is a wave-like oscillation with an amplitude that starts out at zero, increases, and then decreases back to zero. It can typically be visualized as a "brief oscillation" like one might see recorded by a seismograph or heart monitor. Generally, wavelets are purposefully crafted to have...
  
  -like multi-resolution hierarchy and improves its compression capability.

• The DCT
  Discrete cosine transform
  A discrete cosine transform expresses a sequence of finitely many data points in terms of a sum of cosine functions oscillating at different frequencies. DCTs are important to numerous applications in science and engineering, from lossy compression of audio and images A discrete cosine transform...
  
  , the frequency transformation used by JPEG, is slightly lossy because of roundoff error. JPEG XR uses a type of integer transform employing a lifting scheme
  Lifting scheme
  The lifting scheme is a technique for both designing wavelets and performing the discrete wavelet transform.Actually it is worthwhile to merge these steps and design the wavelet filters while performing the wavelet transform....
  
  , which resembles a 4 × 4 DCT but is lossless (exactly invertible).

• JPEG XR allows an optional overlap prefiltering step before each of its 4 × 4 core transform stages. The filter operates on 4 × 4 blocks which are offset by 2 samples in each direction from the 4 × 4 core transform blocks. Its purpose is to improve compression capability and reduce block-boundary artifacts
  Compression artifact
  A compression artifact is a noticeable distortion of media caused by the application of lossy data compression....
  
   at low bitrates. At high bitrates, where such artifacts are typically not a problem, the prefiltering can be omitted to reduce encoding and decoding time. The overlap filtering is constructed using integer operations following a lifting scheme
  Lifting scheme
  The lifting scheme is a technique for both designing wavelets and performing the discrete wavelet transform.Actually it is worthwhile to merge these steps and design the wavelet filters while performing the wavelet transform....
  
  , so that it is also lossless.

• In JPEG, the image DC coefficients of the DCT are predicted by applying DC prediction from the left neighbor transform block, and no other coeffients are predicted. In JPEG XR, blocks are grouped into macroblocks of 16 × 16 samples, and the DC coefficients from each macroblock are passed though another level of frequency transformation, leaving three types of coefficients to be entropy coded: the macroblock DC coefficients (called DC), macroblock-level AC coefficients (called "lowpass"), and lower-level AC coefficients (called AC). Prediction of coefficient values across transform blocks is applied to the DC coefficients and to an additional row or column of AC coefficients as well.

• JPEG XR supports the encoding of an image by decomposing it into smaller individual rectangular tile area regions. Each tile area can be decoded independently from the other areas of the picture. This allows fast access to spatial areas of pictures without decoding the entire picture.

• JPEG XR's entropy coding phase is more adaptive and complex than JPEG's, involving a DC and AC coefficient prediction scheme, adaptive coefficient reordering (in contrast to JPEG's fixed zigzag ordering), and a form of adaptive Huffman coding for the coefficients themselves.

• JPEG uses a single quantization step size per DC/AC component per color plane per image. JPEG XR allows a selection of DC quantization step sizes on a tile region basis, and allows lowpass and AC quantization step sizes to vary from macroblock to macroblock.

• Because all encoding phases except quantization are lossless, JPEG XR is lossless when all quantization coefficients are equal to 1. This is not true of JPEG. JPEG defines a separate lossless mode which does not use the DCT, but it is not implemented by libjpeg
  Libjpeg
  libjpeg is a library written entirely in C which contains a widely-used implementation of a JPEG decoder, JPEG encoder and other JPEG utilities...
  
   and therefore not widely supported.

The HD Photo bitstream specification claims that "HD Photo offers image quality comparable to JPEG-2000 with computational and memory performance more closely comparable to JPEG", that it "delivers a lossy compressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size", and that "lossless compressed images … are typically 2.5 times smaller than the original uncompressed data".

Software support

A reference software implementation of JPEG XR has been published as ITU-T Recommendation T.835 and ISO/IEC International Standard 29199-5.

The following notable software products natively support JPEG XR:

Product Name	Publisher	Read support	Write support
Ashampoo Photo Commander	Ashampoo Ashampoo Ashampoo GmbH & Co. KG is an international computer software company based in Oldenburg, Germany. They are best known for Ashampoo Burning Studio and Ashampoo WinOptimizer. They are general members of the Blu-ray Disc Association and a member of the Intel Software Partner...
Corel Paint Shop Pro	Corel Corel Corel Corporation from the abbreviation is a computer software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, that specializes in graphics processing, similar to Adobe Systems...
Fast Picture Viewer Fast Picture Viewer FastPictureViewer is a commercial 32 and 64-bit image viewer for Windows 7, Vista and XP. Its aim is to facilitate quick review, rating and annotation of large quantities of digital images in the early steps of the digital workflow, with an emphasis on simplicity and speed.As of v1.6, a basic...	Axel Rietschin Software Developments
Internet Explorer 9 Internet Explorer 9 Windows Internet Explorer 9 is the current version of the Internet Explorer web browser from Microsoft. It was released to the public on March 14, 2011 at 21:00 PDT. Internet Explorer 9 supports several CSS 3 properties, embedded ICC v2 or v4 color profiles support via Windows Color System, and...	Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
Konvertor	Logipole Softwares
Microsoft Expression Design Microsoft Expression Design Microsoft Expression Design is Microsoft's commercial professional illustration vector and raster graphic design tool for web images based on Creature House Expression, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2003. It is part of the Microsoft Expression Studio suite...	Microsoft
Microsoft Expression Media Microsoft Expression Media Phase One Media Pro is a commercial digital asset management cataloging program for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. It is the next version of iView MediaPro which Microsoft acquired in June 2006, and sold again in May 2010 to Phase One in Denmark...	Microsoft
Microsoft Image Composite Editor	Microsoft
Windows Live Photo Gallery Windows Live Photo Gallery Windows Live Photo Gallery is a photo management and photo sharing application released as a part of Microsoft's Windows Live initiative. It is an upgraded version of Windows Photo Gallery, which is a part of Windows Vista....	Microsoft
Windows Photo Gallery Windows Photo Gallery Windows Photo Gallery is a photo management, tagging, and editing tool developed by Microsoft, and is included with all editions of Windows Vista...	Microsoft
Windows Photo Viewer	Microsoft
XnView XnView XnView is a cross-platform image viewer used for viewing, converting, organising and editing graphical & video files. It is free of charge for private, educational and non-profit organisations...	Pierre-emmanuel Gougelet
Xara Designer Pro Xara Xtreme Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is a 2D vector graphics editor created by the British software company Xara, which was acquired by German company MAGIX AG in 2007, and now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary. It was previously sold under the names Xara Studio, Xara X and Xara Xtreme...	Xara Group Limited Xara Xara is a UK-based software company founded in 1981. It has developed software for a variety of computer platforms, in chronological order: The Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, Z88, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, Microsoft Windows and Linux. It was originally called Computer Concepts, Ltd.; the company name...
Zoner Photo Studio Zoner Photo Studio Zoner Photo Studio is a software application for viewing, editing, organizing, archiving, publishing and sharing digital images. It also supports GPS-assisted geotagging and creation of 3D pictures.- Versions :...	Zoner Software

The following notable software support JPEG XR through a Plug-in:

Product name	Publisher	Plug-in name	Plug-in publisher	Read support	Write support
Adobe Photoshop CS2 Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated.Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th major release of Adobe Photoshop...	Adobe Systems	HD Photo Plug-ins for Photoshop	Microsoft Corporation
GIMP GIMP GIMP is a free software raster graphics editor. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool and is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux.In addition to detailed image retouching and...  (Windows)	The GIMP Development Team	JPEG XR plugin for GIMP	C. Hausner
IrfanView 4.25 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...	Irfan Skiljan	HDP version 4.26	Irfan Skiljan
Paint.NET Paint.NET Paint.NET is a proprietary freeware raster graphics editor program for Microsoft Windows, developed on the .NET Framework. Originally created by Rick Brewster as a Washington State University student project, Paint.NET has evolved from a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint program, which is...	Rick Brewster	JPEG XR plugin for Paint.NET	C. Hausner

The following APIs and software framework

Software framework

In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed by user code, thus providing application specific software...

s support JPEG XR and may be used in other software to provide JPEG XR support to end users:

Product Name	Publisher	Read support	Write support
Adobe Integrated Runtime Adobe Integrated Runtime Adobe Integrated Runtime, also known as Adobe AIR, is a cross-platform runtime environment developed by Adobe Systems for building Rich Internet Applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, and Ajax, that can be run as desktop applications or on mobile devices...  3.0	Adobe Systems Adobe Systems Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
Adobe Flash Player Adobe Flash Player The Adobe Flash Player is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other...  11.0	Adobe Systems Adobe Systems Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
Integrated Performance Primitives Integrated Performance Primitives Intel Integrated Performance Primitives is a multi-threaded software library of functions for multimedia and data processing applications, produced by Intel....  (IPP)	Intel
LEADTOOLS	LEAD Technologies LEAD Technologies LEAD Technologies Inc. is a privately held software company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. LEAD develops, markets and supports a line of imaging toolkits called LEADTOOLS.- History :...
PICTools	Accusoft Pegasus
Windows Imaging Component Windows Imaging Component The Windows Imaging Component is a Component Object Model based imaging codec framework introduced in Windows Vista and Windows XP Service Pack 3 for working with and processing digital images and image metadata...  (WIC)	Microsoft

The 2011 video game, Rage

Rage (video game)

Rage is a first-person shooter video game by id Software which was released on October 4, 2011 in North America. It uses the company's new OpenGL based id Tech 5 engine. The game was first shown as a tech demo on June 11, 2007, at Apple's WWDC, and was officially announced on August 2, 2007, at...

, employs JPEG XR compression to compress its textures

Texture mapping

Texture mapping is a method for adding detail, surface texture , or color to a computer-generated graphic or 3D model. Its application to 3D graphics was pioneered by Dr Edwin Catmull in his Ph.D. thesis of 1974.-Texture mapping:...

.

Licensing

Microsoft has patents on the technology in JPEG XR. A Microsoft representative stated in a January 2007 interview that in order to encourage the adoption and use of HD Photo, the specification is made available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise

Microsoft Open Specification Promise

The Microsoft Open Specification Promise , is a promise by Microsoft, published in September 2006, to not assert legal rights over certain Microsoft patents on implementations of an included list of technologies....

, which asserts that Microsoft allows implementation of the specification for free, and will not file suits on the patented technology for its implementation, as reportedly stated by Josh Weisberg, director of Microsoft's Rich Media Group. As of 15 August 2010, Microsoft made the resulting JPEG XR standard available under its Community Promise.

In addition to the HD Photo specification itself, Microsoft released the "HD Photo Device Porting Kit" in 2006 which provided source code and build configuration files for multiple platforms. While the license for this code was designed to encourage broad adoption in products, the license terms prohibited including any of Device Porting Kit's code in products or systems that use strong copyleft

Copyleft

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work...

 licensing. As a consequence, any implementation that would be suitable for inclusion in a software package distributed under some software licenses, such as the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

, would need to be based on the image coding specification document or other software.

In July 2010, reference software to implement the JPEG XR standard was published as ITU-T Recommendation T.835 and International Standard

International Standard

The term International Standard may refer to*International standard*International Standard , a category of ballroom dance*International Standard Version, an English Bible translation....

 ISO/IEC 29199-5. Microsoft included these publications in the list of specifications covered by its Community Promise.

External links

Links to standardization publication pages

• ITU-T publications
  • ITU-T T.Sup2 (03/2011) JPEG XR System architecture
  • ITU-T Rec. T.832 (03/2009, updated 12/2009) JPEG XR Image Coding Specification
  • ITU-T Rec. T.833 (09/2010) JPEG XR Motion Format
  • ITU-T Rec. T.834 (01/2010) JPEG XR Conformance Testing
  • ITU-T Rec. T.835 (01/2010) JPEG XR Reference Software
• ISO/IEC publications
  • ISO/IEC TR 29199-1: 2011 JPEG XR System architecture
  • ISO/IEC 29199-2: 2010 JPEG XR Image Coding Specification
  • ISO/IEC 29199-3: 2010 JPEG XR Motion Format
  • ISO/IEC 29199-4: 2010 JPEG XR Conformance Testing
  • ISO/IEC 29199-5: 2010 JPEG XR Reference Software

Links to information from Microsoft

• Microsoft HD Photo website
• Windows Imaging Component, which includes HD Photo support
• Bill Crow's Digital Imaging & Photography Blog. MSDN blogs.

Links to information from others

• This Week in Media podcast about HD Photo, featuring Microsoft's HD Photo Program Manager Bill Crow.
• Comparison WMP – JPEG 2000, Moscow State University Graphics and Media Lab, August 2006.