Backwards Compatible Coding of High Dynamic Range Images with JPEG

In its Paris meeting, the JPEG committee decided to work on a backwards compatible extension of the popular JPEG (10918-1) standard enabling lossy and lossless coding of high-dynamic range (HDR) images, the new standard shall allow legacy applications to decompress new code streams into a tone mapped version of the HDR image while codecs aware of the extensions will decompress the stream with full dynamic range. This paper proposes a set of extensions that have rather low implementation complexity, and use - whenever possible - functional design blocks already present in 10918-1. It is seen that, despite its simplicity, the proposed extension performs close to JPEG 2000 (15444-2) and JPEG XR (29199-2) on the HDR test image set of the JPEG for high bit-rates.