An efficient client-based JPEG2000 image transmission protocol

JPEG2000 is a new still image coding standard that allows to implement efficient remote image browsing applications. In this kind of developments, the clients retreives from a server only the desired regions of the remote images. In the Part 9 of this standard is defined the JPIP protocol, offering a complete set of syntaxes and methods for the remote interrogation of JPEG 2000 images. Using the JPIP protocol, the server side is where all the hard processes are done, so the clients have only to request the desired region and wait for the associated information. This little advantage has many other disadvantages like, for example, to not support the partial proxy caching, to difficult to implement improvement techniques like data prefetching or to offer a poor behaviour in wireless environments. A image transmission protocol with a more complex client side avoids all these disadvantages, only requiring a bit more process in clients. In this paper it is analyzed the current JPIP protocol, showing how affect its philosophy in the mentioned situations. A new JPEG2000 image transmission protocol is presented, J2KP, based on JPIP. Its performance is compared with JPIP and it is demostrated that, all the features rejected by JPIP offer a considerable increase of performance when are applied to this new protocol. Moreover, the process overload in the clients is nearly negligible.