JUNE 8--Last year, Adolf Knoll, deputy librarian of the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague, set out to determine the most-effective wavelet software for still images. Although Knoll did not consider MrSID from Lizardtech in his analysis, he concluded that the LuraWave format (LWF) encoded in Laura Document Format (LDF) was the best choice (MrSid can be found at www.nkp.cz/start/knihcin/digit/vav/wavelet/Efficiency-of-wavelet-conversion.html). "Taking into consideration the fact that LuraTech's LWF 3.0 will be compatible with JPEG2000, it seems that LWF (applied in LDF) will be a good solution for access and delivery of high-quality images," he reports.
At the recent AIIM show (New York), LuraTech demonstrated LuraWave JP2, a beta version of LuraTech's JPEG2000 implementation based on the company's LuraWave technology. LuraWave JP2 is currently available to developers for testing in software-development kits for Windows 98/ME/NT/2000 or as an Adobe Photoshop plug-in.
Motion JPEG2000 (MJP2)--a standard for image sequences that allows JPEG2000-compressed image sequences to be stored in the Motion JPEG2000 file format (MJ2)--still awaits standardization. For interoperability between JPEG2000 and MPEG, Motion JPEG2000, when finalized later this year, will be compatible with the JPEG2000 file format (JP2) and the MPEG-4 file format (MP4). In addition, Motion JPEG2000 will also both lossless and lossy compression in a single codec.
For more on image compression, see the June 2001 issue of Vision Systems Design.
