To: jasper-project@yahoogroups.com
From: <mdadams@ece.ubc.ca>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 11:54:20 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [jasper-project] JasPer Software Version 1.500.0 Available

Hi, Folks.

I am pleased to announce the availability of the next release of JasPer,
version 1.500.0.  Many changes have been made to the software since the
last public release (i.e., version 1.200).  A few of the highlights are
listed below.  This list is in no particular order, and is not intended
to be exhaustive.

1) Major changes have been made to the software in order to better
facilitate the use of the JasPer software as an external library.
All of the JasPer library code is now placed in a single library
called libjasper (instead of several libraries as done previously).
All of the externally visible symbols have been prefixed with "jas_",
"JAS_", etc. as appropriate.  This should greatly lower the probability of
namespace collisions.  The libjasper library now uses jas_malloc, jas_free,
etc. for memory allocation (instead of calling malloc and friends
directly), allowing one to drop in platform-specific memory allocators
more easily.  The configure-based build method now uses libtool in order
to allow libjasper to be built as a shared library.

2) Support for the (original) JPEG format has been added.  More specifically,
a JPEG codec is provided via hooks into the IJG JPEG library.  The IJG
JPEG library is quite portable and should be useable in both Microsoft
Windows and UNIX/POSIX-like environments.  (Some distributions of Linux
include the IJG JPEG library, including Red Hat.)  This JPEG support
allows JasPer to directly transcode between the JPEG and JPEG-2000
formats.  If you are using the configure-based build method for JasPer,
JPEG support will be automatically included if the IJG JPEG library
is detected on your system.  If you are not using this build method
(e.g., if you are using Microsoft Visual C), you will need to customize
the build process yourself.

3) Support for the PGX format (used by the JPEG-2000 VM) has been added.
This support is really only intended for testing purposes.

4) The JPEG-2000 decoder now handles ROIs in a more robust manner.

5) Some minor tweaks were made to the code to reduce the likelihood of
numerical overflow.

6) A bug in the JPEG-2000 decoder that degraded coding efficiency
slightly (when "mode=real" is used) has been fixed.  Thanks to Austin
Lan of Eastman Kodak for discovering this bug.

7) Some minor changes have been made to the command line interface for
the jasper command.  For example, verbose mode is now disabled by default.
Too much crud was being printed before by default, often obscuring
error/warning messages. :-(

8) More of the code has been cleaned up and some new comments added.
Some dead code has also been removed.

9) I have included a somewhat detailed JPEG-2000 tutorial along with the
other documents in the doc directory of the JasPer software distribution.
Hopefully, this tutorial will prove helpful to individuals who would like
a better understanding of the JPEG-2000 standard.  Please note that this
tutorial does not accompany the JasPer releases for the JPEG-2000 Part-5
standard, since such a tutorial might inadvertantly be interpreted as a
normative specification of the JPEG-2000 standard.  In any case, the
most recent revision of the above JPEG-2000 tutorial will soon be
available from my home page (i.e., http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams).

The new JasPer release is available via the JasPer Project Home Page
(i.e., http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams/jasper).
The software should also be available from the JPEG web site some time
in the near future (i.e., http://www.jpeg.org/software).

Regards,
Michael

---
Michael Adams
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of British Columbia
2356 Main Mall, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6T 1Z4
http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams


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