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The best full description of JPEG is the textbook "JPEG Still Image Data Compression Standard" by William B. Pennebaker and Joan L. Mitchell, published by Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1993, ISBN 0-442-01272-1. Price US$59.95, 638 pp. The book includes the complete text of the ISO JPEG standards (DIS 10918-1 and draft DIS 10918-2). This is
by far the most complete exposition of JPEG in existence, and we highly recommend it.
The JPEG standard itself is not available electronically; you must order a paper copy through ISO or ITU. (Unless you feel a need to own a certified official copy, we
recommend buying the Pennebaker and Mitchell book instead; it's much cheaper and includes a great deal of useful explanatory material.) In the USA, copies of the
standard may be ordered from ANSI Sales at (212) 642-4900, or from Global Engineering Documents at (800) 854-7179. (ANSI doesn't take credit card orders, but Global
does.) It's not cheap: as of 1992, ANSI was charging $95 for Part 1 and $47 for Part 2, plus 7% shipping/handling. The standard is divided into two parts, Part 1 being the
actual specification, while Part 2 covers compliance testing methods. Part 1 is titled "Digital Compression and Coding of Continuous-tone Still Images, Part 1:
Requirements and guidelines" and has document numbers ISO/IEC IS 10918-1, ITU-T T.81. Part 2 is titled "Digital Compression and Coding of Continuous-tone Still Images,
Part 2: Compliance testing" and has document numbers ISO/IEC IS 10918-2, ITU-T T.83.
Some extensions to the original JPEG standard are defined in JPEG Part 3, a newer ISO standard numbered ISO/IEC IS 10918-3 and ITU-T T.84. IJG currently does not
support any Part 3 extensions.
The JPEG standard does not specify all details of an interchangeable file format. For the omitted details we follow the "JFIF" conventions, revision 1.02. A copy of the JFIF
spec is available from:
Literature Department
C-Cube Microsystems, Inc.
1778 McCarthy Blvd.
Milpitas, CA 95035
phone (408) 944-6300, fax (408) 944-6314
A PostScript version of this document is available by FTP at ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jfif.ps.gz. There is also a plain text version at ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/
jfif.txt.gz, but it is missing the figures.
The TIFF 6.0 file format specification can be obtained by FTP from ftp://ftp.sgi.com/graphics/tiff/TIFF6.ps.gz. The JPEG incorporation scheme found in the TIFF 6.0 spec of
3-June-92 has a number of serious problems. IJG does not recommend use of the TIFF 6.0 design (TIFF Compression tag 6). Instead, we recommend the JPEG design
proposed by TIFF Technical Note #2 (Compression tag 7). Copies of this Note can be obtained from ftp.sgi.com or from ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/. It is expected that
the next revision of the TIFF spec will replace the 6.0 JPEG design with the Note's design. Although IJG's own code does not support TIFF/JPEG, the free libtiff library uses
our library to implement TIFF/JPEG per the Note. libtiff is available from ftp://ftp.sgi.com/graphics/tiff/.
ARCHIVE LOCATIONS
The "official" archive site for this software is ftp.uu.net (Internet address 192.48.96.9). The most recent released version can always be found there in directory graphics/
jpeg. This particular version will be archived as ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz. If you don't have direct Internet access, UUNET's archives are also available
via UUCP; contact help@uunet.uu.net for information on retrieving files that way.
Numerous Internet sites maintain copies of the UUNET files. However, only ftp.uu.net is guaranteed to have the latest official version.
You can also obtain this software in DOS-compatible "zip" archive format from the SimTel archives (ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/graphics/), or on CompuServe
in the Graphics Support forum (GO CIS:GRAPHSUP), library 12 JPEG Tools. Again, these versions may sometimes lag behind the ftp.uu.net release.
The JPEG FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) article is a useful source of general information about JPEG. It is updated constantly and therefore is not included in this
distribution. The FAQ is posted every two weeks to Usenet newsgroups comp.graphics.misc, news.answers, and other groups. It is available on the World Wide Web at
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/ and other news.answers archive sites, including the official news.answers archive at rtfm.mit.edu: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/
news.answers/jpeg-faq/. If you don't have Web or FTP access, send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with body
send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part1
send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part2
RELATED SOFTWARE
Numerous viewing and image manipulation programs now support JPEG. (Quite a few of them use this library to do so.) The JPEG FAQ described above lists some of the
more popular free and shareware viewers, and tells where to obtain them on Internet.
If you are on a Unix machine, we highly recommend Jef Poskanzer's free PBMPLUS software, which provides many useful operations on PPM-format image files. In
particular, it can convert PPM images to and from a wide range of other formats, thus making cjpeg/djpeg considerably more useful. The latest version is distributed by
the NetPBM group, and is available from numerous sites, notably ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/packages/NetPBM/. Unfortunately PBMPLUS/NETPBM is
not nearly as portable as the IJG software is; you are likely to have difficulty making it work on any non-Unix machine.
A different free JPEG implementation, written by the PVRG group at Stanford, is available from ftp://havefun.stanford.edu/pub/jpeg/. This program is designed for research
and experimentation rather than production use; it is slower, harder to use, and less portable than the IJG code, but it is easier to read and modify. Also, the PVRG code
supports lossless JPEG, which we do not. (On the other hand, it doesn't do progressive JPEG.)
FILE FORMAT WARS
Some JPEG programs produce files that are not compatible with our library. The root of the problem is that the ISO JPEG committee failed to specify a concrete file format.
Some vendors "filled in the blanks" on their own, creating proprietary formats that no one else could read. (For example, none of the early commercial JPEG
implementations for the Macintosh were able to exchange compressed files.)
The file format we have adopted is called JFIF (see REFERENCES). This format has been agreed to by a number of major commercial JPEG vendors, and it has become
the de facto standard. JFIF is a minimal or "low end" representation. We recommend the use of TIFF/JPEG (TIFF revision 6.0 as modified by TIFF Technical Note #2) for
"high end" applications that need to record a lot of additional data about an image. TIFF/JPEG is fairly new and not yet widely supported, unfortunately.
The upcoming JPEG Part 3 standard defines a file format called SPIFF. SPIFF is interoperable with JFIF, in the sense that most JFIF decoders should be able to read the
most common variant of SPIFF. SPIFF has some technical advantages over JFIF, but its major claim to fame is simply that it is an official standard rather than an informal
one. At this point it is unclear whether SPIFF will supersede JFIF or whether JFIF will remain the de-facto standard. IJG intends to support SPIFF once the standard is
frozen, but we have not decided whether it should become our default output format or not. (In any case, our decoder will remain capable of reading JFIF indefinitely.)
Various proprietary file formats incorporating JPEG compression also exist. We have little or no sympathy for the existence of these formats. Indeed, one of the original
reasons for developing this free software was to help force convergence on common, open format standards for JPEG files. Don't use a proprietary file format!
TO DO
The major thrust for v7 will probably be improvement of visual quality. The current method for scaling the quantization tables is known not to be very good at low Q values.
We also intend to investigate block boundary smoothing, "poor man's variable quantization", and other means of improving quality-vs-file-size performance without
sacrificing compatibility.
In future versions, we are considering supporting some of the upcoming JPEG Part 3 extensions --- principally, variable quantization and the SPIFF file format.
As always, speeding things up is of great interest.
Please send bug reports, offers of help, etc. to jpeg-info@uunet.uu.net.
AVC/H.264
THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (i) ENCODE
VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (”AVC VIDEO”) AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A
PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. No LICENSE IS GRANTED OR
SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://MPEGLA.COM.
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, June 1991
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