At its core, JPEG 2000 is an international standard for the compression of still digital images. JPEG 2000 improves on the compression performance of previous methods while offering significant new features and capabilities. The format is multi-resolution, which allows an application to access and decode only the amount of image needed. This allows the user to quickly view an extremely large JPEG 2000 image almost instantly by retrieving and decompressing a low resolution, display sized potion of the file. In addition, the format allows for new access opportunities such as zoom, pan and rotate. JPEG 2000 is still a lossy, compression technique but may have potential for becoming the file format of choice for archival master images in the near future.
