It was recently announced that Stories have exploded on Instagram, with over 500 million daily active users. This social network is just one of many examples of the usefulness of JPEG, a method used for digital images compression. Every day, all over the world, a large number of JPEG images are created and shared. According to a recent report by w3Techs, JPEG is used by 71.4% of websites. The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) won the 2019 Engineering Emmy Award delivered by the US Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. According to Fernando Pereira, Técnico professor and IT researcher, who is among the eight JPEG Subgroup Chairs “this Emmy was delivered to the entire JPEG committee. Two Técnico experts are part of this committee”. Professor João Ascenso, also IT researcher, is the other expert.
“The JPEG standard has remained one of the leading still-image formats for 27 years old and it has been a success. But there are other formats that have been developed over the years, for example, JPEG 2000 is widely used in digital cinema”, says professor Fernando Pereira.
“The JPEG standardization committee specifies image coding solutions (formats), which are largely used worldwide”, explains professor Fernando Pereira. Professor João Ascenso is leading one of the most recent and exciting activities in the field – image coding based on deep learning techniques.
The involvement of IT in the JPEG committee comes naturally. “IT has a group in the area of multimedia representation that works on image coding”. According to professor Fernando Pereira “deep learning techniques are finally used for image coding. Exceptional results have been achieved in short time” . “IT has also been conducting research in the area of 3D point cloud compression using deep learning techniques”, he adds.
The Engineering Emmy Award may be bestowed upon an individual, company or organization for “engineering developments that are so significant an improvement on existing methods or so innovative in nature that they materially affect the transmission, recording or reception of television”.
