 Welcome to the ITU studio in Geneva. I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Turaj Ibrahimi who's professor at EPFL and He's also chairman of JPEG Turaj welcome to the studio Good to be here. Now the engineering team behind the first edition of JPEG has been awarded an Emmy for their outstanding Contribution to image coding as part of that team. I want to do congratulate you for that Thank you very much. My first question is the first edition of JPEG or JPEG one or ITU T81 was released in 1992 it still dominates the marketplace What was the secret to JPEG one success in your opinion and how has this success endured for so long? Yeah, this is a very good question and you could imagine we have been asking these questions to ourselves, too. I Don't really pretend to have the exact answer but I can tell you some of the reasons we find are behind this longevity of Such a such a standard in an environment by the way Which is not used to have such longevity for technologies that are enrolled most technologies Most devices that are used nowadays if you're lucky they last five years and then you move to another technology JPEG one has been going on for 27 years and Everything indicates it has very good future in front of it many decades to come Now why? Well, maybe the first thing it's it's credibility You know that JPEG is a standard that has been endorsed on their hospitals of three standardization bodies One is ITU One is ISO and the last one is IEC now each of these organizations alone. They have already a Magnificent amazing credibility and when they join forces and they endorse a single specification You can just guess There is this is a very very big credibility But that's not a lot of course you need to also have something good behind what is being endorsed and Let me tell you a few of these Particularity of JPEG one of the I would say maybe the boldest decision of the JPEG committee where they started to work in this standard Was to put the user the end user at the center Not necessarily the interest of companies or group of companies, but really paying attention of what users want We know today. This is something many do but I think at that time It was really 30 years ago. It was really a very bold decision and one maybe particular Instantiation example of such a decision was that the standard is not only openly accessible But it is also royalty free which in my opinion is Is a very very important factor behind the longevity and also success from the first place from first day of the standard And it had to be small enough I suppose in those days to to be something that was manageable by the the insert in those days Yes, absolutely. So, you know every image and By extension also video by nature in digital form represent a huge amount of data and It doesn't matter really how much resources you have It is very expensive often to deal with images and with video So you need you are even today even tomorrow You will be always bound and obliged to compress signals the more you compress The more manageable they become so the first reason JPEG standard exist is to really reduce the size of these files to something that is reasonable to manage To store and to transfer at Reasonable cost and at reasonable time, but we know of course that compression is not the only thing But that the quality of the image itself has to has to be of a reasonable standard That people will still want to be using that that that standard is that is that a good enough Description of it you think yeah, so I told you there were many reasons for the success of JPEG one of them is that the On parameter that defines a the file format is not actually the size It's the quality. So as a user You say I want to have at minimum this quality and then the encoder of JPEG It's going to make whatever it can to find the smallest size as long as the quality remains Above the threshold that you have set This is actually a good example Because we could have done the other way around if we were interested in the interests of companies and service providers We would have said hey, I want this file to be ten times smaller Because I don't want to spend more money to buy discs to store it as service provider Or I don't want to spend too much money to Transmit this through networks because I have to buy the infrastructure for it We didn't do it. We actually said well you buy whatever it takes We guarantee or we do at least our best to have these resources as small as possible but The reference is the quality. So you're looking you were looking very much towards the future I'm sure I wanted to ask you how has JPEG's work evolved over the years and what are its top priorities today? Yeah, so since day one JPEG has been Really following more or less the same principles. We want standards that are timely That are user centric. We want them preferably to be royalty free and open and of course We want them to respond to real needs Since JPEG one we have been working on a few other standards one of them is JPEG 2000 That in fact or initially was to replace JPEG But JPEG one was so good some call it. It's a future technology of alien origins That's why it's so good It didn't happen. So JPEG 2000 in fact didn't unseat a JPEG. It created new markets It created a digital cinema. It created A broadcasting it created Medical imaging etc After JPEG 2000 we have been still working and maybe a couple of them I'm gonna Mention without being too long. One of them is JPEG XS JPEG XS is a new standard XS doesn't stand for extra small, but extra speed and this is especially interesting for applications where Latency is very important like self-driving cars. You have an AI module that has to look at the Pictures or video of this of the street and make decisions if the fastest The images from the capture arrived to the AI module The faster the AI module is gonna make a decision and can prevent probably accidents even save lives So this is one of our Top projects. We just finished this first version of the standard. So it is actually international standard The second one I want to talk about is JPEG XL And again here XL is not extra large, but extra Long-term and this one is to replace the JPEG one. So JPEG one has been Magnificent more than quarter of a century. That's several generations in terms of digital life But there will be an end to it and of course JPEG committee has the duty to look at beyond JPEG And this is where we are actually looking at in JPEG XL while you're demystifying Acronyms and initials perhaps you should tell us what JPEG actually stands for and a lot of people will just use the name JPEG but it's of course it has a Actual meaning doesn't it? Absolutely. So JPEG sometimes people actually use it as synonym of pictures or images, right? So they say give me some JPEG's but in fact the name is the acronym of The committee that created it and the first format Somehow is using the same name JPEG stands for joint because it's between these three organizations ISO IEC and ITU P stands for photographic E stands for experts and G for group Excellent. Thank you. Well, I'm sure that that will save a lot of people looking it up on Wikipedia there So finally, I just wanted to ask you you'll be accepting the award on behalf of JPEG ones developers What might you be saying in your acceptance speech? Oh, that's a very interesting question. I would probably say two things One is that the original JPEG team That created this technology Not only created an amazing technology but also set the ground for a lot of other technologies following the same blueprint and In fact a lot of JPEG technologies and a lot of other standardization Technologies that have become successful They are in a way following the same processes the same Approaches as the original JPEG committee and this should not be Forgotten that JPEG is not only a Great technology, but also it was a committee that really defined how standardization should take place In order to be successful You've done extremely well to our jury me Thank you for joining us in the studio and hopefully we'll catch up with you again at some stage in the future and perhaps Discuss the the future evolution of JPEG. It will be with pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you