High Throughput JPEG 2000 for Broadcast and IP-Based Applications

High-Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K) is a royalty-free image compression standard published in 2019 that enhances JPEG 2000 by replacing its slow block coder with a fast block coder. The resulting speedup (e.g., >30× for lossless coding) accelerates the encoding and decoding of images, which can have a great impact on users. A less obvious benefit of the speedup is the enabling of low-latency applications, which was not possible with the original JPEG 2000 standard. Examples of these new potential applications are live, high-quality, low-latency broadcast video contribution, remote production, and Internet Protocol (IP)-based production on-premises and on cloud. This paper examines various HTJ2K encoding parameters and their impact on quality, bitrate, latency, and multigeneration encode/decode cycle performance in the context of requirements of broadcast and IP-based applications. Configurations include a number of different wavelet filters, code-block sizes, and wavelet decomposition structures that are available with HTJ2K. The performance of low-latency HTJ2K is also compared to other low-latency wavelet codecs like VC-2, JPEG XS, and JPEG 2000 Part-1. The JPEG 2000 Part-1 comparisons use the full-frame broadcast profile as well as the ultra-low latency (ULL) configuration as per Video Services Forum (VSF) Technical Recommendation (TR)-01:2018. A tradeoff between latency and compression quality is discussed .