Page 171 - 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

As time went by, C-Cube was restructured (and eventually devolved into Harmonic Inc., LSI Logic, Magnum
Semiconductor, Avago Technologies, Broadcom Limited, and GigOptix, GigPeak, etc.), and lost interest in
the document, and the specification had no official publisher until it was picked up by Ecma International
and the ITU-T/ISO/IEC Joint Photographic Experts Group around 2009 to avoid it being lost to history and
provide a way to formally cite it in standard publications and improve its editorial quality.

It was published by ECMA in 2009 as Technical Report number 98 (TR/98) to avoid loss of the historical
record, and it was formally standardized by ITU-T in 2011 as its Recommendation T. and by ISO/IEC in
2013 as ISO/IEC 10918-5. The newer publications included editorial improvements but no substantial
technical changes.”

The JFIF [22][23] is a minimal file format that enables the exchange of JPEG encoded images (according to
ITU-T T.81 | ISO/IEC 10918-1 [1]) having one or three colour channels and 8 bits per colour channel between
a wide variety of platforms and applications. This minimal format does not include some advanced features
found in various other specified file formats. The optional inclusion of thumbnail images for rapid browsing is
also supported.

Instead of the JFIF, between 1993 and 1996, ISO/IEC and ITU-T developed (under the JTC1 SC29/WG1
convenorship of Eric Hamilton,) ITU-T T.84 | ISO/IEC 10918-3 [24], which defined extensions [including
variable quantization, selective refinement, composite tiling, and a still picture interchange file format (SPIFF)]
to JPEG-1. Added to that, ITU-T T.86 [25] covers registration of JPEG profiles, SPIFF profiles, SPIFF tags, SPIFF
colour spaces, APPn markers, SPIFF compression types and registration authorities (REGAUT).
The SPIFF extension provides for the interchange of image files between application environments. It is a
generic file format intended for interchange only and does not include many of the features found in
application-specific formats. The interchange format omits certain parameters, e.g. aspect ratio and colour
space designation, because they are not strictly required for decoding the image component values. SPIFF is a
complete coded image representation, i.e. it includes all parameters necessary to reconstruct and present the
decoded picture accurately on an output device.

SPIFF was designed to be backwards compatible to JFIF. It was recognized by JPEG from the very beginning
that without backwards compatibility SPIFF would have no chance to succeed on the market. Unfortunately,
even with that policy it did not succeed. It was too complex and too late. Thus, JFIF and their formal versions
in Ecma International (TR/98) [26], ISO/IEC and ITU-T is still the file format standard for JPEG-1 images.

4.3 M-JPEG
As described in Pennebaker and Mitchell [2], one of the earliest implementers of the JPEG Recommendation |
International Standard was C-Cube Microsystems Inc., which developed the CL550 JPEG codec chip in 1990
[27]. This was the world's first real-time JPEG codec capable of compressing and decompressing image frames
fast enough to permit use in full-motion video.
Cockroft and Hourvitz [28] reported the NeXT project of Steve Jobs in 1991,
”NeXT Inc is using the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) draft image compression standard in
several of its products. NeXTstep is the standard operating environment on NeXT computers and uses Tag
Image File Format (TIFF) as its standard image format. NeXTstep supports TIFF file use through the
NXImage class. Version 2.0 of the operating system offers JPEG standard support to all TIFF reading and
writing facilities. All applications using the NXImage class can now read JPEG-compressed TIFF files, which
are read transparently to applications. The company also introduces hardware JPEG processing on its
NeXTdimension graphics board, letting standard-resolution video be compressed or decompressed
at real-time rates. Video frames can be compressed and transferred to hard disks at a rate of 30
frames per second. Playback can also be read from the disk and decompressed. Users can then
display the playback in a sub-window of a megapixel display or direct into a video output jack.”
Thus, early on, JPEG video applications were implemented and this was the first step to M-JPEG becoming a de
facto standard, still used today especially for video editing.

© International Telecommunication Union, 2020 149