JasPer is a computer software project to create a reference implementation of the codec specified in the JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard (i.e. ISO/IEC 15444-1) - started in 1997 at Image Power Inc. and at the University of British Columbia.

As of 2011[update] JasPer operated as a component of many software projects, both free and proprietary, including (but not limited to) netpbm (as of release 10.12), ImageMagick and KDE[4] (as of version 3.2).

[5][6] As of 22 June  2010[update] the GEGL graphics library supported JasPer in its latest Git versions.

[7] In a series of objective JPEG-2000-compression quality tests conducted in 2004, "JasPer was the best codec, closely followed by IrfanView and Kakadu".

[8] However, Jasper remains one of the slowest implementations of the JPEG-2000 codec, as it was designed for reference, not performance.