The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG software

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Table of Contents > QUARC > License Information > Third-Party License Agreements > Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) Library

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The JPEG library publicly released by the Independent JPEG Group (IJG) is supplied with QUARC but is no longer used. However, this license is referenced by the libjpeg-turbo library that has supplanted it and is therefore included here. This document replicates the contents of the README file that accompanied the IJG JPEG software. All references to "software" within the rest of this document refer only to the JPEG software provided by IJG and not to QUARC itself.

The JPEG software is the work of Tom Lane, Guido Vollbeding, Philip Gladstone, Bill Allombert, Jim Boucher, Lee Crocker, Bob Friesenhahn, Ben Jackson, Julian Minguillon, Luis Ortiz, George Phillips, Davide Rossi, Ge' Weijers, and other members of the Independent JPEG Group.

IJG is not affiliated with the official ISO JPEG standards committee.

Overview

This package contains C software to implement JPEG image encoding, decoding, and transcoding. JPEG (pronounced "jay-peg") is a standardized compression method for full-color and gray-scale images.

This software implements JPEG baseline, extended-sequential, and progressive compression processes. Provision is made for supporting all variants of these processes, although some uncommon parameter settings aren't implemented yet. We have made no provision for supporting the hierarchical or lossless processes defined in the standard.

We provide a set of library routines for reading and writing JPEG image files, plus two sample applications "cjpeg" and "djpeg", which use the library to perform conversion between JPEG and some other popular image file formats. The library is intended to be reused in other applications.

In order to support file conversion and viewing software, we have included considerable functionality beyond the bare JPEG coding/decoding capability; for example, the color quantization modules are not strictly part of JPEG decoding, but they are essential for output to colormapped file formats or colormapped displays. These extra functions can be compiled out of the library if not required for a particular application.

We have also included "jpegtran", a utility for lossless transcoding between different JPEG processes, and "rdjpgcom" and "wrjpgcom", two simple applications for inserting and extracting textual comments in JFIF files.

The emphasis in designing this software has been on achieving portability and flexibility, while also making it fast enough to be useful. In particular, the software is not intended to be read as a tutorial on JPEG. (See the REFERENCES section for introductory material.) Rather, it is intended to be reliable, portable, industrial-strength code. We do not claim to have achieved that goal in every aspect of the software, but we strive for it.

We welcome the use of this software as a component of commercial products. No royalty is required, but we do ask for an acknowledgement in product documentation, as described under LEGAL ISSUES.

Legal Issues

In plain English:

We don't promise that this software works. (But if you find any bugs, please let us know!)
You can use this software for whatever you want. You don't have to pay us.
You may not pretend that you wrote this software. If you use it in a program, you must acknowledge somewhere in your documentation that you've used the IJG code.

In legalese:

The authors make NO WARRANTY or representation, either express or implied, with respect to this software, its quality, accuracy, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose. This software is provided "AS IS", and you, its user, assume the entire risk as to its quality and accuracy.

Permission is hereby granted to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software (or portions thereof) for any purpose, without fee, subject to these conditions:

If any part of the source code for this software is distributed, then this README file must be included, with this copyright and no-warranty notice unaltered; and any additions, deletions, or changes to the original files must be clearly indicated in accompanying documentation.
If only executable code is distributed, then the accompanying documentation must state that "this software is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group".
Permission for use of this software is granted only if the user accepts full responsibility for any undesirable consequences; the authors accept NO LIABILITY for damages of any kind.

These conditions apply to any software derived from or based on the IJG code, not just to the unmodified library. If you use our work, you ought to acknowledge us.

Permission is NOT granted for the use of any IJG author's name or company name in advertising or publicity relating to this software or products derived from it. This software may be referred to only as "the Independent JPEG Group's software".

We specifically permit and encourage the use of this software as the basis of commercial products, provided that all warranty or liability claims are assumed by the product vendor.

ansi2knr.c is included in this distribution by permission of L. Peter Deutsch, sole proprietor of its copyright holder, Aladdin Enterprises of Menlo Park, CA. ansi2knr.c is NOT covered by the above copyright and conditions, but instead by the usual distribution terms of the Free Software Foundation; principally, that you must include source code if you redistribute it. (See the file ansi2knr.c for full details.) However, since ansi2knr.c is not needed as part of any program generated from the IJG code, this does not limit you more than the foregoing paragraphs do.

The Unix configuration script "configure" was produced with GNU Autoconf. It is copyright by the Free Software Foundation but is freely distributable. The same holds for its supporting scripts (config.guess, config.sub, ltmain.sh). Another support script, install-sh, is copyright by X Consortium but is also freely distributable.

The IJG distribution formerly included code to read and write GIF files. To avoid entanglement with the Unisys LZW patent, GIF reading support has been removed altogether, and the GIF writer has been simplified to produce "uncompressed GIFs". This technique does not use the LZW algorithm; the resulting GIF files are larger than usual, but are readable by all standard GIF decoders.

We are required to state that "The Graphics Interchange Format© is the Copyright property of CompuServe Incorporated. GIF® is a Service Mark property of CompuServe Incorporated."

References

We recommend reading one or more of these references before trying to understand the innards of the JPEG software.

The best short technical introduction to the JPEG compression algorithm is Wallace, Gregory K. "The JPEG Still Picture Compression Standard", Communications of the ACM, April 1991 (vol. 34 no. 4), pp. 30-44. (Adjacent articles in that issue discuss MPEG motion picture compression, applications of JPEG, and related topics.) If you don't have the CACM issue handy, a PostScript file containing a revised version of Wallace's article is available at https://www.ijg.org/files/Wallace.JPEG.pdf. The file (actually a preprint for an article that appeared in IEEE Trans. Consumer Electronics) omits the sample images that appeared in CACM, but it includes corrections and some added material. Note: the Wallace article is copyright ACM and IEEE, and it may not be used for commercial purposes.

A somewhat less technical, more leisurely introduction to JPEG can be found in "The Data Compression Book" by Mark Nelson and Jean-loup Gailly, published by M&T Books (New York), 2nd ed. 1996, ISBN 1-55851-434-1. This book provides good explanations and example C code for a multitude of compression methods including JPEG. It is an excellent source if you are comfortable reading C code but don't know much about data compression in general. The book's JPEG sample code is far from industrial-strength, but when you are ready to look at a full implementation, you've got one here...

The best currently available description of JPEG is the textbook "JPEG Still Image Data Compression Standard" by William B. Pennebaker and Joan L. Mitchell, published by Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993, ISBN 0-442-01272-1. Price US$59.95, 638 pp. The book includes the complete text of the ISO JPEG standards (DIS 10918-1 and draft DIS 10918-2). Although this is by far the most detailed and comprehensive exposition of JPEG publicly available, we point out that it is still missing an explanation of the most essential properties and algorithms of the underlying DCT technology. If you think that you know about DCT-based JPEG after reading this book, then you are in delusion. The real fundamentals and corresponding potential of DCT-based JPEG are not publicly known so far, and that is the reason for all the mistaken developments taking place in the image coding domain.

The original JPEG standard is divided into two parts, Part 1 being the actual specification, while Part 2 covers compliance testing methods. Part 1 is titled "Digital Compression and Coding of Continuous-tone Still Images, Part 1: Requirements and guidelines" and has document numbers ISO/IEC IS 10918-1, ITU-T T.81. Part 2 is titled "Digital Compression and Coding of Continuous-tone Still Images, Part 2: Compliance testing" and has document numbers ISO/IEC IS 10918-2, ITU-T T.83. IJG JPEG 8 introduces an implementation of the JPEG SmartScale extension which is specified in a contributed document at ITU and ISO with title "ITU-T JPEG-Plus Proposal for Extending ITU-T T.81 for Advanced Image Coding", April 2006, Geneva, Switzerland. The latest version of the document is Revision 3.

The JPEG standard does not specify all details of an interchangeable file format. For the omitted details we follow the "JFIF" conventions, revision 1.02. JFIF 1.02 has been adopted as an Ecma International Technical Report and thus received a formal publication status. It is available as a free download in PDF format from http://www.ijg.org/files/jfif3.pdf. A PostScript version of the JFIF document is available at http://www.ijg.org/files/jfif.ps.gz. There is also a plain text version at http://www.ijg.org/files/jfif.txt.gz, but it is missing the figures.

The TIFF 6.0 file format specification can be obtained by FTP from ftp://ftp.sgi.com/graphics/tiff/TIFF6.ps.gz. The JPEG incorporation scheme found in the TIFF 6.0 spec of 3-June-92 has a number of serious problems. IJG does not recommend use of the TIFF 6.0 design (TIFF Compression tag 6). Instead, we recommend the JPEG design proposed by TIFF Technical Note #2 (Compression tag 7). Copies of this Note can be obtained from https://www.ijg.org/files/. It is expected that the next revision of the TIFF spec will replace the 6.0 JPEG design with the Note's design. Although IJG's own code does not support TIFF/JPEG, the free libtiff library uses our library to implement TIFF/JPEG per the Note.

Archive Locations

The "official" archive site for this software is www.ijg.org. The most recent released version can always be found there in directory "files". This particular version will be archived as https://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v8b.tar.gz, and in Windows-compatible "zip" archive format as https://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsr8b.zip.

The JPEG FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) article is a source of some general information about JPEG. It is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/ and other news.answers archive sites, including the official news.answers archive at rtfm.mit.edu: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/. If you don't have Web or FTP access, send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with body send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part1 send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part2

Acknowledgements

Thank to Juergen Bruder for providing me with a copy of the common DCT algorithm article, only to find out that I had come to the same result in a more direct and comprehensible way with a more generative approach.

Thank to Istvan Sebestyen and Joan L. Mitchell for inviting me to the ITU JPEG (Study Group 16) meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

Thank to Thomas Wiegand and Gary Sullivan for inviting me to the Joint Video Team (MPEG & ITU) meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

Thank to John Korejwa and Massimo Ballerini for inviting me to fruitful consultations in Boston, MA and Milan, Italy.

Thank to Hendrik Elstner, Roland Fassauer, Simone Zuck, Guenther Maier-Gerber, Walter Stoeber, and Fred Schmitz for corresponding business development.

Thank to Nico Zschach and Dirk Stelling of the technical support team at the Digital Images company in Halle for providing me with extra equipment for configuration tests.

Thank to Richard F. Lyon (then of Foveon Inc.) for fruitful communication about JPEG configuration in Sigma Photo Pro software.

Thank to Andrew Finkenstadt for hosting the ijg.org site.

Last but not least special thank to Thomas G. Lane for the original design and development of this singular software package.

File Format Wars

The ISO JPEG standards committee actually promotes different formats like "JPEG 2000" or "JPEG XR" which are incompatible with original DCT-based JPEG and which are based on faulty technologies. IJG therefore does not and will not support such momentary mistakes (see REFERENCES). We have little or no sympathy for the promotion of these formats. Indeed, one of the original reasons for developing this free software was to help force convergence on common, interoperable format standards for JPEG files. Don't use an incompatible file format! (In any case, our decoder will remain capable of reading existing JPEG image files indefinitely.)

TO DO

Version 8 is the first release of a new generation JPEG standard to overcome the limitations of the original JPEG specification. More features are being prepared for coming releases...

Please send bug reports, offers of help, etc. to jpeg-info@uc.ag.

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