The ISO/CCITT standard for continuous-tone image compression

The ISO/CCITT Joint Photographic Experts Group is in the process of developing an international standard for general-purpose, continuous-tone still-image compression. A brief history is presented as background to a summary of the past year's progress, which was highlighted by definition of the overall structure of the proposed standard. This structure consists of a baseline system, a simple coding method sufficient for many applications, a set of extended system capabilities, which extend the baseline system to satisfy a broader range of applications, and an independent lossless method for applications needing that type of compression only.<>