<title>JPEG 2000 file format provides flexible architecture for color encoding</title>

Abstract

In the past, there have been a lot of different image file formats, providing a lot of different capabilities. However, the one thing they pretty much all shared was a very limited mechanism for encoding color. Storing a color image today forces developers to take either a "lowest-common-denominator" approach by using a single standard colorspace in all applications, or by using the capabilities of ICC color management at the loss of wide interoperability.The JPEG 2000 file format changes all this with a new architecture for encoding the colorspace of an image. While the solution is not perfect, it does greatly increase the number of colorspaces that can be encoded while maintaining a very high level of interoperability between applications. This paper describes the color encoding architecture in the JPEG 2000 file format and shows how this new architecture meets the needs of tomorrows imaging applications.