It was developed from 1997 to 2000 by a Joint Photographic Experts Group committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi (later the JPEG president),[1] with the intention of superseding their original JPEG standard (created in 1992), which is based on a discrete cosine transform (DCT), with a newly designed, wavelet-based method.

The JPEG 2000 project was motivated by Ricoh's submission in 1995 of the CREW (Compression with Reversible Embedded Wavelets) algorithm[3][4] to the standardization effort of JPEG-LS.

Ultimately the LOCO-I algorithm was selected as the basis for JPEG-LS, but many of the features of CREW ended up in the JPEG 2000 standard.

The codestream obtained after compression of an image with JPEG 2000 is scalable in nature, meaning that it can be decoded in a number of ways; for instance, by truncating the codestream at any point, one may obtain a representation of the image at a lower resolution, or signal-to-noise ratio – see scalable compression.

[7] Notable markets and applications intended to be served by the standard include: JPEG 2000 decomposes the image into a multiple resolution representation in the course of its compression process.

The JP2 and JPX file formats allow for handling of color-space information, metadata, and for interactivity in networked applications as developed in the JPEG Part 9 JPIP protocol.

Supported color spaces include monochrome, 3 types of YCbCr, sRGB, PhotoYCC, CMY(K), YCCK and CIELab.

The ability of the design to handle a very large range of effective bit rates is one of the strengths of JPEG 2000.

According to the Royal Library of the Netherlands, "the current JP2 format specification leaves room for multiple interpretations when it comes to the support of ICC profiles, and the handling of grid resolution information".

This step is called multiple component transformation in the JPEG 2000 language since its usage is not restricted to the RGB color model.

These tiles are then wavelet-transformed to an arbitrary depth, in contrast to JPEG 1992 which uses an 8×8 block-size discrete cosine transform.

They are typically sized so that they provide an efficient way to access only part of the (reconstructed) image, though this is not a requirement.

The problem is now to find the optimal packet length for all code blocks which minimizes the overall distortion in a way that the generated target bitrate equals the demanded bit rate.

While the standard does not define a procedure as to how to perform this form of rate–distortion optimization, the general outline is given in one of its many appendices: For each bit encoded by the EBCOT coder, the improvement in image quality, defined as mean square error, gets measured; this can be implemented by an easy table-lookup algorithm.

The Lagrange multiplier, typically denoted by λ, turns out to be the critical slope, the constraint is the demanded target bitrate, and the value to optimize is the overall distortion.

Packets can be reordered almost arbitrarily in the JPEG 2000 bit-stream; this gives the encoder as well as image servers a high degree of freedom.

On the other hand, color components can be moved back in the bit-stream; lower resolutions (corresponding to low-frequency sub-bands) could be sent first for image previewing.

Higher-resolution images tend to benefit more, where JPEG 2000's spatial-redundancy prediction can contribute more to the compression process.

On CPU the main idea of getting fast JPEG 2000 encoding and decoding is closely connected with AVX/SSE and multithreading to process each tile in a separate thread.

The fastest JPEG 2000 solutions utilize both CPU and GPU power to get high performance benchmarks.

The part-2 extension to JPEG 2000 (ISO/IEC 15444-2) enriches the file format by including mechanisms for animation or composition of several codestreams into one single image.

For traditional JPEG, additional metadata, e.g. lighting and exposure conditions, is kept in an application marker in the Exif format specified by the JEITA.

Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this Recommendation | International Standard may be the subject of patent rights other than those identified in the above mentioned databases.

It is an open ISO standard and an advanced update to MJPEG (or MJ), which was based on the legacy JPEG format.

Unlike common video formats, such as MPEG-4 Part 2, WMV, and H.264, MJ2 does not employ temporal or inter-frame compression.

Its physical structure does not depend on time ordering, but it does employ a separate profile to complement the data.

[58] JP2 and JPX files containing GMLJP2 markup can be located and displayed in the correct position on the Earth's surface by a suitable Geographic Information System (GIS), in a similar way to GeoTIFF and GTG images.