Ensuring the sustainability of JPEG 2000 for preservation 02 Dec 2010

In my presentation during the Wellcome Trust’s JPEG 2000 seminar I discussed the suitability of JPEG 2000 (and more specifically its JP2 format) for long-term preservation. I highlighted the erroneous restriction in the JP2 (and JPX) format specification that only allows ICC profiles of the ‘input’ class to be used. This effectively prohibits the use of all working colour spaces such as Adobe RGB, which are defined using ‘display device’ profiles. I also showed how different software vendors interpret the format specification in subtly different ways, and how such issues can create problems in the long term, such as the loss of colour space and resolution information after some future migration.