Page 177 - 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

The subtype names the specific image format. These names are case insensitive. Two initial subtypes are
"jpeg" for the JPEG format, JFIF encoding, and "gif" for GIF format [GIF].

The list of image subtypes given here is neither exclusive nor exhaustive, and is expected to grow as more
types are registered with IANA, as described in Appendix E.

The formal grammar for the content-type header field for data of type image is given by image-type:=
"image" "/" ("gif" / "jpeg" / extension-token)”

4.6 Standards in medical image communications
The use of JPEG-1 and the many subsequent formats (e.g. JPEG-LS, JPEG2000) of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 have been
always of great interest to the medical imaging community. Representatives of the American College of
Radiology-National Electrical Manufacturers Association (ACR-NEMA) standardization body came
occasionally to early JPEG meetings. They showed interest both in the requirements (e.g. “lossy” image for a
fast diagnosis and “lossless” for confirmation and archival) and the formats, but they never wanted to be part
of the ITU-T ISO/IEC JTC1 image standardization community. They always had ACR-NEMA and took over much
of the JPEG or MPEG work. This is definitely a great success for JPEG.
Section 4 of Liu et al. [34] reads
“In the early 1980s, the digital medical imaging industry was rapidly growing and the need for the
development of standards for digital communication of medical images was evident. In 1983, two
organizations—the American College of Radiology (ACR) which is a professional society of radiologists,
radiation oncologists, and clinical medical physicists in the United States, and the National Electrical
Manufacturers Association (NEMA) which is a trade association representing manufacturers came
together to form the Digital Imaging and Communications Standards Committee. The committee published
the first version of its standard (ACR-NEMA 300-1985) in 1985. The standardization effort continued to
evolve as participation from outside of the United States as well as from medical specialties beyond
radiology grew and the medical imaging industry transitioned to networked operations. In 1993, the name
of the committee was changed to Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and a
substantially revised standard, also known as DICOM, was released.”

4.7 JPEG as a military standard
This applications area and the success of JPEG as a military standard came as a surprise to the author and the
members of the original JPEG Development Team. As previously mentioned, the toolbox element-defining
applications of JPEG originated in requirements from telecommunications, and the PC and printing-industries,
but none from the military.
Thus, requirements derived from purely civilian applications and use cases. JPEG simply did not have on its
radar that the defined “toolbox” was flexible and powerful enough to apply, for example, for high-resolution
military areal images.
Nevertheless, the specification developed by JPEG was picked up for part of the US Government’s National
Imagery Transmission Format Standards (NITFS) system in the early 1990s and apparently was found also
useful to be in their application space.
The NITFS version of JPEG was documented in MIL-STD-188/198 [35]:

“This standard establishes the requirements to be met by systems complying with NITFS when image data
are compressed using the JPEG image compression algorithm as described in DIS 10918-1, Digital
compression and coding of continuous-tone still images.”
MIL-STD-188/198 was based on the draft International Standard for ITU-T T.81 (1992) | ISO 10918-1:1994
[1]. This is basically the final version that was approved by CCITT in September 1992.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has also been using JPEG in its standards.

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