JPEGˈdʒeɪpɛɡ/ JAY-peg, short for Joint Photographic Experts Group)[2] is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. 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.[3] Since its introduction in 1992, JPEG has been the most widely used image compression standard in the world,[4][5] and the most widely used digital image format, with several billion JPEG images produced every day as of 2015.[6]
The Joint Photographic Experts Group created the standard in 1992.[7] JPEG was largely responsible for the proliferation of digital images and digital photos across the Internet and later social media.[8][circular reference] JPEG compression is used in a number of image file formats. JPEG/Exif is the most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image capture devices; along with JPEG/JFIF, it is the most common format for storing and transmitting photographic images on the World Wide Web.[9] These format variations are often not distinguished and are simply called JPEG.
The MIME media type for JPEG is "image/jpeg", except in older Internet Explorer versions, which provide a MIME type of "image/pjpeg" when uploading JPEG images.[10] JPEG files usually have a filename extension of "jpg" or "jpeg". JPEG/JFIF supports a maximum image size of 65,53565,535 pixels,[11] hence up to 4 gigapixels for an aspect ratio of 1:1. In 2000, the JPEG group introduced a format intended to be a successor, JPEG 2000, but it was unable to replace the original JPEG as the dominant image standard.[12]
The JPEG specification also cites three other patents from IBM. Other companies cited as patent holders include AT&T (two patents) and Canon Inc.[1] Absent from the list is U.S. patent 4,698,672, filed by Compression Labs' Wen-Hsiung Chen and Daniel J. Klenke in October 1986. The patent describes a DCT-based image compression algorithm, and would later be a cause of controversy in 2002 (see Patent controversy below).[13] However, the JPEG specification did cite two earlier research papers by Wen-Hsiung Chen, published in 1977 and 1984.[1]
"JPEG" stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the name of the committee that created the JPEG standard and also other still picture coding standards. The "Joint" stood for ISO TC97 WG8 and CCITT SGVIII. Founded in 1986, the group developed the JPEG standard during the late 1980s. The group published the JPEG standard in 1992.[4]
The JPEG standard specifies the codec, which defines how an image is compressed into a stream of bytes and decompressed back into an image, but not the file format used to contain that stream.[19]The Exif and JFIF standards define the commonly used file formats for interchange of JPEG-compressed images.
In 2002, Forgent Networks asserted that it owned and would enforce patent rights on the JPEG technology, arising from a patent that had been filed on October 27, 1986, and granted on October 6, 1987: U.S. patent 4,698,672 by Compression Labs' Wen-Hsiung Chen and Daniel J. Klenke.[13][24] While Forgent did not own Compression Labs at the time, Chen later sold Compression Labs to Forgent, before Chen went on to work for Cisco. This led to Forgent acquiring ownership over the patent.[13] Forgent's 2002 announcement created a furor reminiscent of Unisys' attempts to assert its rights over the GIF image compression standard.
Between 2002 and 2004, Forgent was able to obtain about US$105 million by licensing their patent to some 30 companies. In April 2004, Forgent sued 31 other companies to enforce further license payments. In July of the same year, a consortium of 21 large computer companies filed a countersuit, with the goal of invalidating the patent. In addition, Microsoft launched a separate lawsuit against Forgent in April 2005.[27] In February 2006, the United States Patent and Trademark Office agreed to re-examine Forgent's JPEG patent at the request of the Public Patent Foundation.[28] On May 26, 2006, the USPTO found the patent invalid based on prior art. The USPTO also found that Forgent knew about the prior art, yet it intentionally avoided telling the Patent Office. This makes any appeal to reinstate the patent highly unlikely to succeed.[29]
The JPEG committee has as one of its explicit goals that their standards (in particular their baseline methods) be implementable without payment of license fees, and they have secured appropriate license rights for their JPEG 2000 standard from over 20 large organizations.
Beginning in August 2007, another company, Global Patent Holdings, LLC claimed that its patent (U.S. patent 5,253,341) issued in 1993, is infringed by the downloading of JPEG images on either a website or through e-mail. If not invalidated, this patent could apply to any website that displays JPEG images. The patent was under reexamination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from 2000 to 2007; in July 2007, the Patent Office revoked all of the original claims of the patent but found that an additional claim proposed by Global Patent Holdings (claim 17) was valid.[32] Global Patent Holdings then filed a number of lawsuits based on claim 17 of its patent.
In its first two lawsuits following the reexamination, both filed in Chicago, Illinois, Global Patent Holdings sued the Green Bay Packers, CDW, Motorola, Apple, Orbitz, Officemax, Caterpillar, Kraft and Peapod as defendants. A third lawsuit was filed on December 5, 2007, in South Florida against ADT Security Services, AutoNation, Florida Crystals Corp., HearUSA, MovieTickets.com, Ocwen Financial Corp. and Tire Kingdom, and a fourth lawsuit on January 8, 2008, in South Florida against the Boca Raton Resort & Club. A fifth lawsuit was filed against Global Patent Holdings in Nevada. That lawsuit was filed by Zappos.com, Inc., which was allegedly threatened by Global Patent Holdings, and sought a judicial declaration that the '341 patent is invalid and not infringed.
Global Patent Holdings had also used the '341 patent to sue or threaten outspoken critics of broad software patents, including Gregory Aharonian[33] and the anonymous operator of a website blog known as the "Patent Troll Tracker."[34] On December 21, 2007, patent lawyer Vernon Francissen of Chicago asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine the sole remaining claim of the '341 patent on the basis of new prior art.[35]
On March 5, 2008, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office agreed to reexamine the '341 patent, finding that the new prior art raised substantial new questions regarding the patent's validity.[36] In light of the reexamination, the accused infringers in four of the five pending lawsuits have filed motions to suspend (stay) their cases until completion of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's review of the '341 patent. On April 23, 2008, a judge presiding over the two lawsuits in Chicago, Illinois granted the motions in those cases.[37] On July 22, 2008, the Patent Office issued the first "Office Action" of the second reexamination, finding the claim invalid based on nineteen separate grounds.[38] On Nov. 24, 2009, a Reexamination Certificate was issued cancelling all claims.
Beginning in 2011 and continuing as of early 2013, an entity known as Princeton Digital Image Corporation,[39] based in Eastern Texas, began suing large numbers of companies for alleged infringement of U.S. patent 4,813,056. Princeton claims that the JPEG image compression standard infringes the '056 patent and has sued large numbers of websites, retailers, camera and device manufacturers and resellers. The patent was originally owned and assigned to General Electric. The patent expired in December 2007, but Princeton has sued large numbers of companies for "past infringement" of this patent. (Under U.S. patent laws, a patent owner can sue for "past infringement" up to six years before the filing of a lawsuit, so Princeton could theoretically have continued suing companies until December 2013.) As of March 2013, Princeton had suits pending in New York and Delaware against more than 55 companies. General Electric's involvement in the suit is unknown, although court records indicate that it assigned the patent to Princeton in 2009 and retains certain rights in the patent.[40]
The JPEG compression algorithm operates at its best on photographs and paintings of realistic scenes with smooth variations of tone and color. For web usage, where reducing the amount of data used for an image is important for responsive presentation, JPEG's compression benefits make JPEG popular. JPEG/Exif is also the most common format saved by digital cameras.
However, JPEG is not well suited for line drawings and other textual or iconic graphics, where the sharp contrasts between adjacent pixels can cause noticeable artifacts. Such images are better saved in a lossless graphics format such as TIFF, GIF, PNG, or a raw image format. The JPEG standard includes a lossless coding mode, but that mode is not supported in most products.
As the typical use of JPEG is a lossy compression method, which reduces the image fidelity, it is inappropriate for exact reproduction of imaging data (such as some scientific and medical imaging applications and certain technical image processing work).
JPEG uses a lossy form of compression based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT). This mathematical operation converts each frame/field of the video source from the spatial (2D) domain into the frequency domain (a.k.a. transform domain). A perceptual model based loosely on the human psychovisual system discards high-frequency information, i.e. sharp transitions in intensity, and color hue. In the transform domain, the process of reducing information is called quantization. In simpler terms, quantization is a method for optimally reducing a large number scale (with different occurrences of each number) into a smaller one, and the transform-domain is a convenient representation of the image because the high-frequency coefficients, which contribute less to the overall picture than other coefficients, are characteristically small-values with high compressibility. The quantized coefficients are then sequenced and losslessly packed into the output bitstream. Nearly all software implementations of JPEG permit user control over the compression ratio (as well as other optional parameters), allowing the user to trade off picture-quality for smaller file size. In embedded applications (such as miniDV, which uses a similar DCT-compression scheme), the parameters are pre-selected and fixed for the application.
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