Page 166 - 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

3.1 Conclusions and take aways on JPEG and the IJG OSS process
i) Standardization first by an SDO, forum or consortium and subsequent implementation of the standard
in OSS is a useful project, and was done in the JPEG-1 standardization project. Nevertheless,
standardization and product development must be close in time to each other, so that the relationship
between standard setting and implementation can be established.
ii) OSS implementation is helpful in the verification of the standard, providing feedback into the
standardization project.
iii) OSS implementation first helps to promote the standard and to ensure market acceptance. In the case
of JPEG-1, the worldwide and free availability of the IJG code that could be built in into various
applications free of charge contributed significantly to the success of the JPEG-1 Recommendation |
International Standard.
iv) OSS prefers to take standards for implementation that are patent RF. However, the patent policy of ITU,
ISO and IEC only guarantees RAND. RF declarations on patents in the standard are not enough, because
all contributors are permitted to submit contributions under RAND too, plus there is always a remaining
third party left-out part that is RAND. There are organizations with RF patent policy options (e.g. W3C,
OASIS, Ecma International) that also have real RF-based patent policy regimes. So co-operating with
them on such projects is beneficial. Fast tracking of or a PAS for such standards in JTC1 is also a good
solution too.
v) The co-operation between IJG and JPEG worked well for about 10 years. First, the JPEG Committee was
absorbed by ITU-T SG8 and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29. This was the case after the ITU/ISO/IEC co-operation
for joint work and joint text Recommendation | International Standard document had been formalized
in 1993. Then JPEG continued to work according to ITU-T and JTC1 policies and rules, and lost some
special components (like the JPEG IPR policy) that were rather OSS friendly. The informal liaison
between JPEG and IJG was never formalized (IJG had no legal status). However, until about 2000, the IJG
gradually also implemented further ITU-T T.81 (1992) ISO/IEC 10918-1:1993 [1] components (like
progressive coding modes), changed their direction slightly and started to fork from the ITU-T/ISO/IEC
Recommendation | International Standard. Moreover, a new generation of leadership and membership
took over the IJG work, which had slightly different goals from the starting IJG generation. Such
unpredictability in the long-term relation to OSS is a reality and should be taken into consideration.

4. PLANNED AND NOT DIRECTLY PLANNED (BUT SUCCESSFUL) JPEG APPLICATIONS
As pointed out in section 2, the most detailed requirements for the JPEG toolbox came from CCITT SGVIII.
Consequently, after the JPEG-1 Recommendation was approved in 1992, work continued in ITU-T to include
ITU-T T.81 in ITU-T applications. These are briefly described in 4.1.
Furthermore, for other JPEG experts, like Pennebaker and Mitchell [2] it was clear that this toolbox had many
possible other uses besides communication, PC-images, printing, medical images etc. However, as [2] explains,
those were left to other applications and remained outside of the JPEG-1 Recommendation | International
Standard. This section describes a few examples of these.

4.1 ITU-T JPEG applications
It is an irony of standardization that the requirements and the toolbox came from telecommunication use
cases to support a new generation of ITU-T imaging telecommunication applications. However, many of these
applications are, from today’s historic perspective, less successful and rather unimportant.
Colour facsimile group 4 (4.1.2) never reached the market, videotex (4.1.3) has been completely replaced by
the worldwide web, ODA (4.1.5) never became really popular, and was replaced with hypertext on the web
and other office document applications like office open extensible markup language (OOXML) or open
document format (ODF), which themselves became ISO/IEC International Standards.

144 © International Telecommunication Union, 2020