Page 151 - ITU Journal, ICT Discoveries, Volume 3, No. 1, June 2020 Special issue: The future of video and immersive media

ITU Journal: ICT Discoveries, Vol. 3(1), June 2020

Dates What happened

September 18, Approval of CCITT T.81 (JPEG) Recommendation by ITU
1992
7 December - 22 APP-92
December 1992 - Additional Plenipotentiary Conference (Geneva, 1992)
Geneva, streamlined ITU into three Sectors: Telecommunication Standardization (ITU-T),
Switzerland Radiocommunication (ITU-R), and Telecommunication Development (ITU-D).

February 1993 JPEG in the first web browsers
1-12 March 1993 WTSC-93
World Telecommunication Standardization Conference. Helsinki, Finland
ITU-T A.23 [5] formally approved
Study Group 8 – “Terminals for telematic services” with Question:
“16/8 Common Component for Image Communication”
Rapporteur: István Sebestyén
January 28, 1994 FDIS ballot closes: Approval of International Standard ISO/IEC 10918-1
February 1994 Publication of ISO/IEC 10918-1

2. REQUIREMENTS OF ITU-T T.81 (1992) |ISO/IEC 10918-1:1993 [1] AND ITS TOOLBOX
NATURE
The JPEG-1 standard itself was of the toolbox type, i.e. a bit like a set of different building bricks from which
many different types of still picture codecs and applications could be assembled according to the needs of the
different type of imaging applications. Examples of such applications include digital photos, videotex, colour
facsimile, medical images, web-images and high-resolution, digital images of museum paintings), which build
on different components, e.g. lossy vs. lossless and sequential vs. progressive image build up, scaling in image
size and image quality. Not all components needed for a complete application (like colour facsimile) were
defined by JPEG. So, no file format was standardized – that was left to each application; also, JPEG was colour
blind, leaving the selection of colour model to applications.
Nevertheless, the flexibility of design means that even today popular motion image engines and applications
can still be put together, like the motion-JPEG that had more to do with the Next project of Steve Jobs, than
with the still picture-coding mandate of the JPEG group.

The JPEG obtained the original requirements for the JPEG-1 image compression standard from three sources:
• (ITU) CCITT SGVIII Q.18 (New image communications) with special rapporteurs Manfred Worlitzer
(DBP) from 1985 to 1987, and István Sebestyén (Siemens) from 1987 to 2000;
• ESPRIT 563 [6] photovideotex image compression algorithm (PICA) [7] research project on integrated
service digital network (ISDN) photo-videotex under chair, Graham Hudson (BT Research Labs);
• ISO TC97 SC2/WG8 under convener, Hiroshi Yasuda (NTT).
The ESPRIT 563 [6] PICA [7] research project on ISDN photo-videotex concentrated on that application,
which was rather close to the type of text and photos seen on the web. The PICA [7] project brought to JPEG
several important components, like several candidate algorithms (one being the winning adaptive discrete
cosine transform (ADCT) method), several test and selection images, and the testing and selection
infrastructure (test and selection at Københavns Telefonselskab (KTAS), Copenhagen).
The requirements from TC97 SC2/WG8 were rather limited due to the fact that SC2 only had a limited scope
to coding of various types, like coded characters, mosaic graphics and musical notation, some but not much
for image coding, and especially for switching from one form to the other (e.g. from character to graphic).
However, even for still image coding, the compression and coding, like that for facsimile (modified Huffman
(MH), modified READ (relative element address designate) (MR), modified modified READ (MMR)), came from
CCITT. JPEG also had contacts with some other ISO committees like TC97 SC18 and ITU-T SG8 on Office
document architecture (ODA), which had interests in the raster-graphic type of still image as an application.

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