2006.05.01 01:34 "[Tiff] JBIG2 patent situation", by Glenn Widener

MUCH smaller file sizes courtesy of JBIG2! And the possibility of JPEG2000 for color images. PLUS, the ability to do "image segmentation"

JBIG2 and JPEG2000 use patented algorithms so they are not as useful as they should be.

Patents, provided they are covered by "reasonable licensing" aren't considered a limiting factor in ISO standards. So that's a non-issue.

If all your world is commercial software, then yes this may work. But then again, there have been rumblings even in the IEEE and other standards bodies about problems caused by the the loose definition of "reasonable licensing", and the way some companies seem to end up making a lot of money from patents they introduce into a standard.

But history proves that if you want wide acceptance of a format, you'd better make it free of cost, and "reasonable licensing" doesn't allow this. (Remember JPEG and arithmetic encoding? Why did PNG get invented ?)

My definition of "reasonable licensing" for a standard interchange format would be "free to anyone, forever, with minimal effort".

I did a brief googleing of "jbig patent", and the best reference on jbig2 I found was:

http://www.jpeg.org/jbig/faq.phtml?action=show_answer&question_id=q3f042a7298c94

Apparently there are only two known patentholders relevant to jbig2, IBM and Mitsubishi, both of which are offering free licensing. I will be testing this, but if anyone has more reliable info, I'm curious.

So, it would seem that free JBIG2 implementations, and JBIG2 in TIFF, should be feasible.

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Glenn Widener

SwiftView, Inc.