Lossless JPEG is a 1993 addition to JPEG standard by the Joint Photographic Experts Group to enable lossless compression. However, the term may also be used to refer to all lossless compression schemes developed by the group, including JPEG 2000, JPEG-LS, and JPEG XL.
Lossless JPEG was developed as a late addition to JPEG in 1993, using a completely different technique from the lossy JPEG standard. It uses a predictive scheme based on the three nearest (causal) neighbors (upper, left, and upper-left), and entropy coding is used on the prediction error. The standard Independent JPEG Group libraries cannot encode or decode it, but Ken Murchison of Oceana Matrix Ltd. wrote a patch that extends the IJG library to handle lossless JPEG.[1] Lossless JPEG has some popularity in medical imaging, and is used in DNG and some digital cameras to compress raw images, but otherwise was never widely adopted. Adobe's DNG SDK provides a software library for encoding and decoding lossless JPEG with up to 16 bits per sample.
ISO/IEC Joint Photography Experts Group maintains a reference software implementation which can encode both base JPEG (ISO/IEC 10918-1 and 18477-1) and JPEG XT extensions (ISO/IEC 18477 Parts 2 and 6-9), as well as JPEG-LS (ISO/IEC 14495).[2]
A number of people have been interested in my patch which adds lossless JPEG support (per the original spec -- not JPEG-LS) to libjpeg v6b. I have decided to make this patch available via my ftp site (ftp://ftp.oceana.com/pub/ljpeg-6b.tar.gz).
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