JPEG2000 is the ISO standard for those vendors that require maximum file compression and throughput while simultaneously maintaining the highest quality for both video and still image content. In July 2005, it was adopted by the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) as the format for the storage and distribution of motion pictures.

JPEG2000 addresses several weaknesses inherent in existing video formats such as improved visual fidelity at high compression rates, low latency, increased error resiliency in wireless network environments and multi-resolution decoding from a single source file. JPEG2000 is currently being deployed in digital cinema, HD broadcast production, wireless transport of in-home entertainment and video surveillance applications.

JPEG2000 provides low bit rate operation with rate-distortion and subjective image quality performance without sacrificing performance at other points in the rate-distortion spectrum.

JPEG2000 addresses areas where current standards fail to produce the best quality of performance, such as:

Low bit rate compression performance
Lossless and lossy compression in a single codestream
Large images (JPEG is restricted to 64kx64k images without tiling). JPEG2000 will handle image sizes up to (2^32 - 1)
Single decompression architecture
Error resilience for transmission in noisy environments, such as wireless and the Internet
Computer generated imagery
Compound documents
Region of interest coding
Improved compression techniques to accommodate rich content and higher resolutions
Metadata mechanisms for incorporating additional non-image data as part of the file

JPEG2000 handles up to 256 channels of information, as compared to JPEG, which is limited to only RGB data. Thus, JPEG2000 is capable of describing complete alternate color models, such as CMYK, and full ICC (International Color Consortium). JPEG2000 exhibits better compression efficiency than JPEG, results show an approximate 40% reduction in file size over JPEG compression.

JPEG2000 refers to all parts of the standard: Part 1 (the core) is now published as an International Standard, five more parts (2-6) are complete or nearly complete, and four new parts (8-11) are under development.

Application areas for JPEG2000 include:

Internet
Digital Photography
Medical Imaging
Wireless imaging
Document imaging
Pre-Press
Remote sensing and GIS
Cultural Heritage
Scientific and Industrial
Digital Cinema
Image archives and databases
Surveillance
Printing and scanning
Facsimile