The JPEG 2000 standard is a wavelet based compression methodology that achieves nearly an order of magnitude better compression performance than the existing DCT-based JPEG standard. Thus, it is desirable to convert existing JPEG images into JPEG 2000 images in order to minimize the storage and/or communications bandwidth requirements. JPEG 2000's performance enhancement can be maximized if its Region of Interest (ROI) coding option is employed. Unfortunately, this option results in a low bit rate coder, which tends to be plagued with ringing artifacts due to the abrupt truncation of high frequency wavelet coefficients at the ROI edges. In this paper, we briefly describe a novel minimum distortion transcoding technology to convert compressed JPEG images into compressed JPEG 2000 images. Experimental results indicate that the visual quality of resulting images is improved, while the time required to download them has been dramatically deceased. We expect that these new techniques can also be applied to computer vision, medical imaging, and e-commerce applications.
['Keesook J. Han', 'Bruce W. Suter']
Low-bit rate enhanced quality JPEG to JPEG 2000 encoding