On the JPEG 2000 ultrafast mode

Recently, the JPEG committee discussed the introduction of an “ultrafast” mode for JPEG 2000 encoding. This considered extension of the JPEG 2000 framework replaces the EBCOT coding by a combined Huffman-Runlength code, and adds an optional additional prediction step after quantization. While the resulting codec is not compatible with existing JPEG 2000, it still allows lossless transcoding from JPEG 2000 and back, and performance measurements show that it offers nearly the quality of JPEG 2000 and similar quality than JPEG XR at a much lower complexity comparable to the complexity of the IJG JPEG software. This work introduces the extension, and compares its performance with other JPEG standards and other extensions of JPEG 2000 currently under standardization.