| The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG software |
| ========================================== |
| |
| README for release 6b of 27-Mar-1998 |
| ==================================== |
| |
| This distribution contains the sixth public release of the Independent JPEG |
| Group's free JPEG software. You are welcome to redistribute this software and |
| to use it for any purpose, subject to the conditions under LEGAL ISSUES, below. |
| |
| Serious users of this software (particularly those incorporating it into |
| larger programs) should contact IJG at jpeg-info@uunet.uu.net to be added to |
| our electronic mailing list. Mailing list members are notified of updates |
| and have a chance to participate in technical discussions, etc. |
| |
| This software is the work of Tom Lane, Philip Gladstone, Jim Boucher, |
| Lee Crocker, Julian Minguillon, Luis Ortiz, George Phillips, Davide Rossi, |
| Guido Vollbeding, Ge' Weijers, and other members of the Independent JPEG |
| Group. |
| |
| IJG is not affiliated with the official ISO JPEG standards committee. |
| |
| |
| DOCUMENTATION ROADMAP |
| ===================== |
| |
| This file contains the following sections: |
| |
| OVERVIEW General description of JPEG and the IJG software. |
| LEGAL ISSUES Copyright, lack of warranty, terms of distribution. |
| REFERENCES Where to learn more about JPEG. |
| ARCHIVE LOCATIONS Where to find newer versions of this software. |
| RELATED SOFTWARE Other stuff you should get. |
| FILE FORMAT WARS Software *not* to get. |
| TO DO Plans for future IJG releases. |
| |
| Other documentation files in the distribution are: |
| |
| User documentation: |
| install.doc How to configure and install the IJG software. |
| usage.doc Usage instructions for cjpeg, djpeg, jpegtran, |
| rdjpgcom, and wrjpgcom. |
| *.1 Unix-style man pages for programs (same info as usage.doc). |
| wizard.doc Advanced usage instructions for JPEG wizards only. |
| change.log Version-to-version change highlights. |
| Programmer and internal documentation: |
| libjpeg.doc How to use the JPEG library in your own programs. |
| example.c Sample code for calling the JPEG library. |
| structure.doc Overview of the JPEG library's internal structure. |
| filelist.doc Road map of IJG files. |
| coderules.doc Coding style rules --- please read if you contribute code. |
| |
| Please read at least the files install.doc and usage.doc. Useful information |
| can also be found in the JPEG FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) article. See |
| ARCHIVE LOCATIONS below to find out where to obtain the FAQ article. |
| |
| If you want to understand how the JPEG code works, we suggest reading one or |
| more of the REFERENCES, then looking at the documentation files (in roughly |
| the order listed) before diving into the code. |
| |
| |
| OVERVIEW |
| ======== |
| |
| This package contains C software to implement JPEG image compression and |
| decompression. JPEG (pronounced "jay-peg") is a standardized compression |
| method for full-color and gray-scale images. JPEG is intended for compressing |
| "real-world" scenes; line drawings, cartoons and other non-realistic images |
| are not its strong suit. JPEG is lossy, meaning that the output image is not |
| exactly identical to the input image. Hence you must not use JPEG if you |
| have to have identical output bits. However, on typical photographic images, |
| very good compression levels can be obtained with no visible change, and |
| remarkably high compression levels are possible if you can tolerate a |
| low-quality image. For more details, see the references, or just experiment |
| with various compression settings. |
| |
| This software implements JPEG baseline, extended-sequential, and progressive |
| compression processes. Provision is made for supporting all variants of these |
| processes, although some uncommon parameter settings aren't implemented yet. |
| For legal reasons, we are not distributing code for the arithmetic-coding |
| variants of JPEG; see LEGAL ISSUES. We have made no provision for supporting |
| the hierarchical or lossless processes defined in the standard. |
| |
| We provide a set of library routines for reading and writing JPEG image files, |
| plus two sample applications "cjpeg" and "djpeg", which use the library to |
| perform conversion between JPEG and some other popular image file formats. |
| The library is intended to be reused in other applications. |
| |
| In order to support file conversion and viewing software, we have included |
| considerable functionality beyond the bare JPEG coding/decoding capability; |
| for example, the color quantization modules are not strictly part of JPEG |
| decoding, but they are essential for output to colormapped file formats or |
| colormapped displays. These extra functions can be compiled out of the |
| library if not required for a particular application. We have also included |
| "jpegtran", a utility for lossless transcoding between different JPEG |
| processes, and "rdjpgcom" and "wrjpgcom", two simple applications for |
| inserting and extracting textual comments in JFIF files. |
| |
| The emphasis in designing this software has been on achieving portability and |
| flexibility, while also making it fast enough to be useful. In particular, |
| the software is not intended to be read as a tutorial on JPEG. (See the |
| REFERENCES section for introductory material.) Rather, it is intended to |
| be reliable, portable, industrial-strength code. We do not claim to have |
| achieved that goal in every aspect of the software, but we strive for it. |
| |
| We welcome the use of this software as a component of commercial products. |
| No royalty is required, but we do ask for an acknowledgement in product |
| documentation, as described under LEGAL ISSUES. |
| |
| |
| LEGAL ISSUES |
| ============ |
| |
| In plain English: |
| |
| 1. We don't promise that this software works. (But if you find any bugs, |
| please let us know!) |
| 2. You can use this software for whatever you want. You don't have to pay us. |
| 3. You may not pretend that you wrote this software. If you use it in a |
| program, you must acknowledge somewhere in your documentation that |
| you've used the IJG code. |
| |
| In legalese: |
| |
| The authors make NO WARRANTY or representation, either express or implied, |
| with respect to this software, its quality, accuracy, merchantability, or |
| fitness for a particular purpose. This software is provided "AS IS", and you, |
| its user, assume the entire risk as to its quality and accuracy. |
| |
| This software is copyright (C) 1991-1998, Thomas G. Lane. |
| All Rights Reserved except as specified below. |
| |
| Permission is hereby granted to use, copy, modify, and distribute this |
| software (or portions thereof) for any purpose, without fee, subject to these |
| conditions: |
| (1) If any part of the source code for this software is distributed, then this |
| README file must be included, with this copyright and no-warranty notice |
| unaltered; and any additions, deletions, or changes to the original files |
| must be clearly indicated in accompanying documentation. |
| (2) If only executable code is distributed, then the accompanying |
| documentation must state that "this software is based in part on the work of |
| the Independent JPEG Group". |
| (3) Permission for use of this software is granted only if the user accepts |
| full responsibility for any undesirable consequences; the authors accept |
| NO LIABILITY for damages of any kind. |
| |
| These conditions apply to any software derived from or based on the IJG code, |
| not just to the unmodified library. If you use our work, you ought to |
| acknowledge us. |
| |
| Permission is NOT granted for the use of any IJG author's name or company name |
| in advertising or publicity relating to this software or products derived from |
| it. This software may be referred to only as "the Independent JPEG Group's |
| software". |
| |
| We specifically permit and encourage the use of this software as the basis of |
| commercial products, provided that all warranty or liability claims are |
| assumed by the product vendor. |
| |
| |
| ansi2knr.c is included in this distribution by permission of L. Peter Deutsch, |
| sole proprietor of its copyright holder, Aladdin Enterprises of Menlo Park, CA. |
| ansi2knr.c is NOT covered by the above copyright and conditions, but instead |
| by the usual distribution terms of the Free Software Foundation; principally, |
| that you must include source code if you redistribute it. (See the file |
| ansi2knr.c for full details.) However, since ansi2knr.c is not needed as part |
| of any program generated from the IJG code, this does not limit you more than |
| the foregoing paragraphs do. |
| |
| The Unix configuration script "configure" was produced with GNU Autoconf. |
| It is copyright by the Free Software Foundation but is freely distributable. |
| The same holds for its supporting scripts (config.guess, config.sub, |
| ltconfig, ltmain.sh). Another support script, install-sh, is copyright |
| by M.I.T. but is also freely distributable. |
| |
| It appears that the arithmetic coding option of the JPEG spec is covered by |
| patents owned by IBM, AT&T, and Mitsubishi. Hence arithmetic coding cannot |
| legally be used without obtaining one or more licenses. For this reason, |
| support for arithmetic coding has been removed from the free JPEG software. |
| (Since arithmetic coding provides only a marginal gain over the unpatented |
| Huffman mode, it is unlikely that very many implementations will support it.) |
| So far as we are aware, there are no patent restrictions on the remaining |
| code. |
| |
| The IJG distribution formerly included code to read and write GIF files. |
| To avoid entanglement with the Unisys LZW patent, GIF reading support has |
| been removed altogether, and the GIF writer has been simplified to produce |
| "uncompressed GIFs". This technique does not use the LZW algorithm; the |
| resulting GIF files are larger than usual, but are readable by all standard |
| GIF decoders. |
| |
| We are required to state that |
| "The Graphics Interchange Format(c) is the Copyright property of |
| CompuServe Incorporated. GIF(sm) is a Service Mark property of |
| CompuServe Incorporated." |
| |
| |
| REFERENCES |
| ========== |
| |
| We highly recommend reading one or more of these references before trying to |
| understand the innards of the JPEG software. |
| |
| The best short technical introduction to the JPEG compression algorithm is |
| Wallace, Gregory K. "The JPEG Still Picture Compression Standard", |
| Communications of the ACM, April 1991 (vol. 34 no. 4), pp. 30-44. |
| (Adjacent articles in that issue discuss MPEG motion picture compression, |
| applications of JPEG, and related topics.) If you don't have the CACM issue |
| handy, a PostScript file containing a revised version of Wallace's article is |
| available at ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/wallace.ps.gz. The file (actually |
| a preprint for an article that appeared in IEEE Trans. Consumer Electronics) |
| omits the sample images that appeared in CACM, but it includes corrections |
| and some added material. Note: the Wallace article is copyright ACM and IEEE, |
| and it may not be used for commercial purposes. |
| |
| A somewhat less technical, more leisurely introduction to JPEG can be found in |
| "The Data Compression Book" by Mark Nelson and Jean-loup Gailly, published by |
| M&T Books (New York), 2nd ed. 1996, ISBN 1-55851-434-1. This book provides |
| good explanations and example C code for a multitude of compression methods |
| including JPEG. It is an excellent source if you are comfortable reading C |
| code but don't know much about data compression in general. The book's JPEG |
| sample code is far from industrial-strength, but when you are ready to look |
| at a full implementation, you've got one here... |
| |
| The best full description of JPEG is the textbook "JPEG Still Image Data |
| Compression Standard" by William B. Pennebaker and Joan L. Mitchell, published |
| by Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993, ISBN 0-442-01272-1. Price US$59.95, 638 pp. |
| The book includes the complete text of the ISO JPEG standards (DIS 10918-1 |
| and draft DIS 10918-2). This is by far the most complete exposition of JPEG |
| in existence, and we highly recommend it. |
| |
| The JPEG standard itself is not available electronically; you must order a |
| paper copy through ISO or ITU. (Unless you feel a need to own a certified |
| official copy, we recommend buying the Pennebaker and Mitchell book instead; |
| it's much cheaper and includes a great deal of useful explanatory material.) |
| In the USA, copies of the standard may be ordered from ANSI Sales at (212) |
| 642-4900, or from Global Engineering Documents at (800) 854-7179. (ANSI |
| doesn't take credit card orders, but Global does.) It's not cheap: as of |
| 1992, ANSI was charging $95 for Part 1 and $47 for Part 2, plus 7% |
| shipping/handling. The standard is divided into two parts, Part 1 being the |
| actual specification, while Part 2 covers compliance testing methods. Part 1 |
| is titled "Digital Compression and Coding of Continuous-tone Still Images, |
| Part 1: Requirements and guidelines" and has document numbers ISO/IEC IS |
| 10918-1, ITU-T T.81. Part 2 is titled "Digital Compression and Coding of |
| Continuous-tone Still Images, Part 2: Compliance testing" and has document |
| numbers ISO/IEC IS 10918-2, ITU-T T.83. |
| |
| Some extensions to the original JPEG standard are defined in JPEG Part 3, |
| a newer ISO standard numbered ISO/IEC IS 10918-3 and ITU-T T.84. IJG |
| currently does not support any Part 3 extensions. |
| |
| The JPEG standard does not specify all details of an interchangeable file |
| format. For the omitted details we follow the "JFIF" conventions, revision |
| 1.02. A copy of the JFIF spec is available from: |
| Literature Department |
| C-Cube Microsystems, Inc. |
| 1778 McCarthy Blvd. |
| Milpitas, CA 95035 |
| phone (408) 944-6300, fax (408) 944-6314 |
| A PostScript version of this document is available by FTP at |
| ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jfif.ps.gz. There is also a plain text |
| version at ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jfif.txt.gz, but it is missing |
| the figures. |
| |
| The TIFF 6.0 file format specification can be obtained by FTP from |
| ftp://ftp.sgi.com/graphics/tiff/TIFF6.ps.gz. The JPEG incorporation scheme |
| found in the TIFF 6.0 spec of 3-June-92 has a number of serious problems. |
| IJG does not recommend use of the TIFF 6.0 design (TIFF Compression tag 6). |
| Instead, we recommend the JPEG design proposed by TIFF Technical Note #2 |
| (Compression tag 7). Copies of this Note can be obtained from ftp.sgi.com or |
| from ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/. It is expected that the next revision |
| of the TIFF spec will replace the 6.0 JPEG design with the Note's design. |
| Although IJG's own code does not support TIFF/JPEG, the free libtiff library |
| uses our library to implement TIFF/JPEG per the Note. libtiff is available |
| from ftp://ftp.sgi.com/graphics/tiff/. |
| |
| |
| ARCHIVE LOCATIONS |
| ================= |
| |
| The "official" archive site for this software is ftp.uu.net (Internet |
| address 192.48.96.9). The most recent released version can always be found |
| there in directory graphics/jpeg. This particular version will be archived |
| as ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz. If you don't have |
| direct Internet access, UUNET's archives are also available via UUCP; contact |
| help@uunet.uu.net for information on retrieving files that way. |
| |
| Numerous Internet sites maintain copies of the UUNET files. However, only |
| ftp.uu.net is guaranteed to have the latest official version. |
| |
| You can also obtain this software in DOS-compatible "zip" archive format from |
| the SimTel archives (ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/graphics/), or |
| on CompuServe in the Graphics Support forum (GO CIS:GRAPHSUP), library 12 |
| "JPEG Tools". Again, these versions may sometimes lag behind the ftp.uu.net |
| release. |
| |
| The JPEG FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) article is a useful source of |
| general information about JPEG. It is updated constantly and therefore is |
| not included in this distribution. The FAQ is posted every two weeks to |
| Usenet newsgroups comp.graphics.misc, news.answers, and other groups. |
| It is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/ |
| and other news.answers archive sites, including the official news.answers |
| archive at rtfm.mit.edu: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/. |
| If you don't have Web or FTP access, send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu |
| with body |
| send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part1 |
| send usenet/news.answers/jpeg-faq/part2 |
| |
| |
| RELATED SOFTWARE |
| ================ |
| |
| Numerous viewing and image manipulation programs now support JPEG. (Quite a |
| few of them use this library to do so.) The JPEG FAQ described above lists |
| some of the more popular free and shareware viewers, and tells where to |
| obtain them on Internet. |
| |
| If you are on a Unix machine, we highly recommend Jef Poskanzer's free |
| PBMPLUS software, which provides many useful operations on PPM-format image |
| files. In particular, it can convert PPM images to and from a wide range of |
| other formats, thus making cjpeg/djpeg considerably more useful. The latest |
| version is distributed by the NetPBM group, and is available from numerous |
| sites, notably ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/graphics/graphics/packages/NetPBM/. |
| Unfortunately PBMPLUS/NETPBM is not nearly as portable as the IJG software is; |
| you are likely to have difficulty making it work on any non-Unix machine. |
| |
| A different free JPEG implementation, written by the PVRG group at Stanford, |
| is available from ftp://havefun.stanford.edu/pub/jpeg/. This program |
| is designed for research and experimentation rather than production use; |
| it is slower, harder to use, and less portable than the IJG code, but it |
| is easier to read and modify. Also, the PVRG code supports lossless JPEG, |
| which we do not. (On the other hand, it doesn't do progressive JPEG.) |
| |
| |
| FILE FORMAT WARS |
| ================ |
| |
| Some JPEG programs produce files that are not compatible with our library. |
| The root of the problem is that the ISO JPEG committee failed to specify a |
| concrete file format. Some vendors "filled in the blanks" on their own, |
| creating proprietary formats that no one else could read. (For example, none |
| of the early commercial JPEG implementations for the Macintosh were able to |
| exchange compressed files.) |
| |
| The file format we have adopted is called JFIF (see REFERENCES). This format |
| has been agreed to by a number of major commercial JPEG vendors, and it has |
| become the de facto standard. JFIF is a minimal or "low end" representation. |
| We recommend the use of TIFF/JPEG (TIFF revision 6.0 as modified by TIFF |
| Technical Note #2) for "high end" applications that need to record a lot of |
| additional data about an image. TIFF/JPEG is fairly new and not yet widely |
| supported, unfortunately. |
| |
| The upcoming JPEG Part 3 standard defines a file format called SPIFF. |
| SPIFF is interoperable with JFIF, in the sense that most JFIF decoders should |
| be able to read the most common variant of SPIFF. SPIFF has some technical |
| advantages over JFIF, but its major claim to fame is simply that it is an |
| official standard rather than an informal one. At this point it is unclear |
| whether SPIFF will supersede JFIF or whether JFIF will remain the de-facto |
| standard. IJG intends to support SPIFF once the standard is frozen, but we |
| have not decided whether it should become our default output format or not. |
| (In any case, our decoder will remain capable of reading JFIF indefinitely.) |
| |
| Various proprietary file formats incorporating JPEG compression also exist. |
| We have little or no sympathy for the existence of these formats. Indeed, |
| one of the original reasons for developing this free software was to help |
| force convergence on common, open format standards for JPEG files. Don't |
| use a proprietary file format! |
| |
| |
| TO DO |
| ===== |
| |
| The major thrust for v7 will probably be improvement of visual quality. |
| The current method for scaling the quantization tables is known not to be |
| very good at low Q values. We also intend to investigate block boundary |
| smoothing, "poor man's variable quantization", and other means of improving |
| quality-vs-file-size performance without sacrificing compatibility. |
| |
| In future versions, we are considering supporting some of the upcoming JPEG |
| Part 3 extensions --- principally, variable quantization and the SPIFF file |
| format. |
| |
| As always, speeding things up is of great interest. |
| |
| Please send bug reports, offers of help, etc. to jpeg-info@uunet.uu.net. |