A third dimension is required in many an application of still pictures, such as in medical domain and artistic representations for Cultural Heritage. Even a number of industrial images would take advantage of a 3D representation which would allow for better understanding of the content. This Part 10 of the Standard is the most R&D oriented of the four, and the partners experience in this domain will be joined to keep ahead of the developments and evaluation software modules.

JP3D will provide a mechanism for compression and decompression of volume data. JPEG2000 part 1 provides encoding and decoding mechanisms for two-dimensional image data. Part 2 provides extension to multiple components via de-correlating transforms. However, there is no provision for encoding across the de-correlated components. There is only two-dimensional encoding among the de-correlated components. Therefore, this part will provide the means for encoding directly three-dimensional set of original or transformed data. The applications are to volume imagery, usually gathered by tomography to create a volume medical, biological or geological images, or to measurement data associated with a three-dimensional grid.

Some of the 2KAN partners have already done experimental work in 3D imaging and will bring their knowledge of this domain to solve the problems raised by the users of both Medical and Cultural Heritage images, knowing that the results will also find more applications in the scientific and industrial domains. The partners are confident that their combined knowledge of this part which has not been enough investigated so far will result in innovative solutions and efficient contributions to the Standard.