JPEG 2000 codestream

JPEG 2000 codestream (also known as J2K, J2C, or JPEG 2000 Part 1, Core Coding System) is the wavelet-based compressed image format defined in Part 1 of the JPEG 2000 standard. Both lossy and lossless compression are supported.

It may appear in a file by itself, but it was designed to be embedded in JP2 or another file format.

Format
A JPEG 2000 codestream uses a variant of JPEG format, with a nearly identical system of markers and segments. (Note that the container formats used by JP2 and other JPEG 2000 file formats are completely different.)

Identifiers
There is no official filename extension, but .j2k and .j2c are commonly used.

Identification
Files start with bytes.

Specifications

 * JPEG 2000 Committee Drafts → fcd15444-1.pdf
 * ITU-T Rec.T.800: JPEG 2000: Core coding system (not free to download)
 * ISO/IEC 15444-1 (not free to download)
 * ISO/IEC 15444-1:2004/Amd 1:2006: Profiles for digital cinema applications (not free to download)
 * ISO/IEC 15444-1:2004/Amd 2:2009: Extended profiles for cinema and video production and archival applications (not free to download)
 * ISO/IEC 15444-1:2004/Amd 3:2010: Profiles for broadcast applications (not free to download)
 * BIIF Profile for JPEG 2000
 * JPEG 2000 Profile for the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP Profile)

Sample files

 * http://www.openjpeg.org/index.php?menu=samples
 * http://www.opf-labs.org/format-corpus/jp2k-formats/balloon.j2c

Software

 * Refer to JPEG 2000

Links

 * JPEG 2000
 * JPEG 2000 web site
 * JPEG 2000 Part 1 web site