JPEG XS, a new standard for visually lossless low-latency lightweight image compression

JPEG XS is an upcoming standard from the JPEG Committee (formally known as ISO/IEC SC29 WG1). It aims to provide an interoperable visually lossless low-latency lightweight codec for a wide range of applications including mezzanine compression in broadcast and Pro-AV markets. This requires optimal support of a wide range of implementation technologies such as FPGAs, CPUs and GPUs. Targeted use cases are professional video links, IP transport, Ethernet transport, real-time video storage, video memory buffers, and omnidirectional video capture and rendering. In addition to the evaluation of the visual transparency of the selected technologies, a detailed analysis of the hardware and software complexity as well as the latency has been done to make sure that the new codec meets the requirements of the above-mentioned use cases. In particular, the end-to-end latency has been constrained to a maximum of 32 lines. Concerning the hardware complexity, neither encoder nor decoder should require more than 50% of an FPGA similar to Xilinx Artix 7 or 25% of an FPGA similar to Altera Cyclon 5. This process resulted in a coding scheme made of an optional color transform, a wavelet transform, the entropy coding of the highest magnitude level of groups of coefficients, and the raw inclusion of the truncated wavelet coefficients. This paper presents the details and status of the standardization process, a technical description of the future standard, and the latest performance evaluation results.