JPEG-XS—A High-Quality Mezzanine Image Codec for Video Over IP

Richter, Thomas [Fraunhofer IIS Germany] Keinert, Joachim [Fraunhofer IIS Germany] Foessel, Siegfried [Fraunhofer IIS Germany] Descampe, Antonin [UCL] Rouvroy, Gael [intoPIX SA, Belgium] Lorent, Jean-Baptiste [intoPIX SA, Belgium]

More and higher quality UHD content is arriving in the production environment, requesting additional bandwidths for data transmission and exchange. In parallel, a more flexible infrastructure based on the well-known IP protocol stack is very desirable. Adding mezzanine compression in the production workflow can reduce the necessary data transmission capacities or even enable the usage of existing infrastructure for higher resolution and higher quality content designed for previous HD production lines. A low complexity of a mezzanine codec with ultra-low latency by preserving highest quality is one of the biggest challenges for such a new codec design. Having this in mind the JPEG committee started a new work item, called JPEG-XS, addressing the need for an interoperable video-over-IP codec. This paper presents the specific requirements for such a codec, shows the results of the call for proposals, the advances during the core experiment phase and provides some insight into the selected technology.