In May 1990 the International Standards Organization/International Electronics Commission/Joint Technical Committee 1/Subcommittee 24 (ISO/IECJTCI/SC24) approved the proposal for a new work item on imaging. The need for such a standard and the imaging market requirements are outlined in the document "New York Item Proposal in Imaging." The main contributors to this initial document were two national standardization committees already working in the imaging field: the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and Deutsches Institut fur Normung (DIN). The DIN working group on imaging was founded in 1989 to organize the results and concepts derived from fundamental research projects in image processing systems, imaging models, and image interchange formats. These projects were conducted by German research institutes and companies. The New Work Item Proposal determined thet the Image Processing and Interchange (IPI) Standard will consist of three parts: 1. the common imaging architecture, 2. the application-programming interface (API), and 3. the image interchange format (IIF)