LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 compression/decompression conforms to the JPEG2000 International Standard. This new state-of-the-art ISO/ITU still image compression standard provides a fast and flexible solution for high-quality, wavelet-based compression. LEAD has committed to fully support all future parts as they are released and therefore LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 will continue to grow as the JPEG2000 standard grows.

JPEG 2000 Overview

JPEG2000 is a new image-encoding standard that provides a feature set vital to many high end and emerging imaging applications. JPEG2000 provides high compression with image quality superior to all existing standard encoding techniques. This high compression and quality performance is due to the adaptation of wavelet transforms. Wavelet transforms are mathematical formulas that represent complex structures in the image, thereby compressing an extremely large amount of image data into a relatively small amount of compressed data. This compression technique allows applications to save compressed images with higher compression ratios and better image quality as compared to any other software currently in production.

JPEG2000 is a wavelet-based compression stored in a hierarchical format which contains several stored resolutions of the image in the same file without duplication. For that reason, a JPEG2000 compressed image can then be sent to a device in the resolution that best fits without additional storage overhead. LEAD Technologies has used its more than ten years in the imaging and compression developer toolkit marketplace to formulate a JPEG2000 product that offers developers the best JPEG2000 implementation available.

LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 Plug-in Features

The LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 plug-in currently supports:

• Support for the JP2 file format and JPEG2000 Stream Data.
• Improved performance and quality.
• Lossless compression, meaning the decompressed image data is exactly as it was before compression.
• Support for four progressive display methods:
  • Quality Axis - The image starts blurred and the sharpness increases as more image data is received.
  • Resolution Axis - The image is loaded as a smaller version and the physical pixel size increases as more image data is received.
  • Color Axis - The image is loaded one color plane at a time. The image starts loading as a grayscale image and the color will fill in as more image data is received.
  • Position Axis - The image is loaded as blocks. As more image data is received, more blocks are displayed.
• Multiple resolutions can be stored in the same file without duplication of the image data providing the ability to only decode and display the size of image required by the application.
• Error checking and robustness allows the transmission of JPEG2000 encoded files over a noisy medium. If an error occurs in the decoding, the image will still be displayed.
• Control over the final size of the file without hit and miss quality factor adjustments.

The LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 plug-in can be added on to any LEADTOOLS v12.1 toolkit that includes raster image format support. This includes Raster, Vector, Document and Medical Imaging product lines.