Guest post: Color in JP2

Rob Buckley, colour imaging expert and author of JPEG 2000 as a Preservation and Access Format for the Wellcome Library, writes about the implementation of colour space metadata in the JP2 format and planned changes to the specification to better accommodate this information.

When I talk about JPEG 2000, I point out that most if not all still image applications that use JPEG 2000, especially in the cultural heritage community, can be satisfied with the JP2 file format. JP2 is the basic file format defined in Part 1 of the JPEG 2000 standard, along with the core decoder. Part 2 of the standard defines extended versions of both the file format and decoder, offering features aimed at specialized or advanced applications.

One point of confusion about the use of JP2 has had to do with its support for color spaces. When we were developing JP2 in the late 1990’s (JPEG 2000 was intended to come out in 2000), the application that most influenced the design was digital photography—JP2 was expected to be the next digital camera format. So support for sRGB was built in, along with support for the YCC and grayscale versions of sRGB. Other RGB color spaces used for image capture would be supported by using ICC input profiles, leaving aside display and output profiles. However, not all ICC input profiles were allowed: support was restricted to the ones needed for grayscale and RGB image data. Not supported and considered too complex for applications without a full color management engine was the input profile type that used a full multi-dimensional lookup-table. So users had the choice of specifying color in a JP2 file by name as sRGB (or sYCC or sGray) or via a simple ICC input profile.

After the release of the JPEG 2000 standard, two things happened. First digital cameras kept exporting the JPEG Baseline format; when they added a new export format, it was Raw and not JP2. The drive was toward more creative control rather than better compression when what they had was good enough.

The second thing was that most people ended up using ICC display profiles for RGB spaces rather than input profiles. A small thing you’d think, especially when the only difference between the display profiles they used and the input profiles supported by JP2 was the profile class value in the profile’s header: except for that, the data content of the two profile types is identical for RGB color spaces. As a result, I could take a JP2 file containing an RGB display profile (which technically makes the JP2 file illegal) change the profile class from display to input (by changing four bytes in the profile header and leaving everything else the same) and produce a legal JP2 file. It turns out that most readers ignore this value anyway and read the file fine either way. Using the extended file format was no help because it only extended color support to all types of input profiles, plus some other named and vendor-specified color spaces.

This confusion needed to be addressed as more and more institutions are using JP2 as a long-term preservation format, where predictability and clarity are prized. The solution is straightforward: amend the JP2 file format specification, aligning it with current practice so that it supports ICC display profiles as well as the set of input profiles it supports now.

And this is what is happening. Richard Clark and I led an activity that culminated in the JPEG 2000 committee approving a new activity to amend JP2 when it met this past February in Tokyo. This means that JP2 will support a wide range of RGB color spaces, which was the original intent, via both ICC input and display profiles. Since the JP2 spec was first issued, the ICC spec has undergone a major revision from V2 to V4 and been issued as an ISO standard. While this revision hardly affects the profiles used for RGB color spaces, it will also be addressed as part of the amendment. (The amendment will also address the ambiguity in the JP2 definition of resolution that Johan van der Knijff has brought up on this blog.)

The final outcome of all this will be a JP2 file format standard that aligns with current practice; supports RGB spaces such as Adobe RGB 1998, ProPhoto RGB and eci RGB v2; and provides a smooth migration path from TIFF masters as JP2 increasingly becomes used as an image preservation format.