A bandwidth effective streaming of JPEG2000 images using hypertext transfer protocol

JPEG2000 is now one of the most promising image compression standards for supporting efficient scalable exchange of large images. Considering Web browsing as a major activity in the Internet, we believe that a large portion of JPEG2000 images would be hosted by Web servers and be retrieved through Internet browsers by means of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). We propose a bandwidth effective streaming mechanism, called BEST, for JPEG2000 images. In addition to providing image streaming, BEST also acts as an efficient and effective traffic shaper/regulator. Through the fragmentation of the JPEG2000 image based on the quality layer of the code-stream, together with the regulation of transmission rates according to the current channel capacity indicated by TCP, BEST achieves streaming of JPEG2000 images through Web browsing and, at the same time, prevents low bit-rate channels from being congested by the instantly exhaustive transmission of JPEG2000 images from Web servers.