Microsoft Wants Its HD Photo Technology to Be an Industry Standard

Microsoft is looking to get more of its technology certified as an industry standard and has submitted its HD Photo technology to the Joint Photographic Expert Group for a decision in that regard.

JPEG, a working group of the International Organization for Standardization, has decided to introduce a new work item for the standardization of Microsofts HD Photo file format, tentatively titled "JPEG XR"; formal balloting of this work item is being submitted to the JPEG national delegations for approval.

The ballot deadline for this new project is early October 2007, with the finalization and publication of the completed standard, if approved, expected to take up to a year after that.

The HD Photo technology was incubated in Microsoft Research some five years ago, where it was known as photon and developed by the Core Media Processing Team, before becoming part of the Windows Media family and being renamed Windows Media Photo.

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Tom Robertson, Microsofts general manager of interoperability and standards, told eWEEK that this move is another example of the Redmond, Wash., software makers focus on interoperability in a way that allows innovative solutions and technologies to evolve over time.

"One of the ways we do this is by making our intellectual property available to others, as giving them access better enables them to build solutions that interoperate well with our products and services and with those from other industry players using the same technologies," he said.

Standards are also a very important part of the companys overall interoperability program, and Microsoft is active in more than 400 standards development efforts and has implemented thousands of standards in its products, Robertson said.

"Microsoft Research spent a lot of time and energy developing the HD Photo technology, which is going to enable a whole new generation of digital imagery and photography," he said.

But JPEG XR will be the second part of a bigger work item called JPEG Systems, which is a forum for the standardization of systems integration technologies focused on the current and emerging needs of consumer and professional digital photography, Robert Rossi, Microsofts principal program manager lead for emerging image and video, told eWEEK.

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"The JPEG Systems architecture is being introduced as a new major work item, while JPEG XR is being introduced as the second part of this. Part one is going to be a technical report defining this new overreaching architecture, focusing on the future needs of digital photography, that will have a more IT-centric approach," Rossi said.

The current technologies for image coding, like JPEG, just take the technologies that exist for digital still cameras in the film world and make a digital version of them, he said, adding that "we are now looking at placing a bigger emphasis on a connected, integrated means of dealing with images, including how they are handled on the Web, where there is partial Web processing and further processing in a network environment, and how the images are dealt with interactively over the Web."

Part of that work was done in the JPEG 2000 standard, and so some of that technology will migrate into this new architecture and be made interoperable with multiple types of baseline file formats, Rossi said, expressing confidence that there is a "very high probability" the technology will become a standard.

The HD Photo technology brought a number of innovations, including a high dynamic range feature that allows innovation to be developed in cameras to increase the number of successful photographs taken by those with digital still cameras, professional-grade cameras and cell phones.

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