OpenJPH 0.9 Released For Further Speeding Up Open-Source High-Throughput JPEG 2000

While JPEG XL is regarded as the next-generation JPEG standard and JPEG 2000 never quite took off to supersede the original JPEG standard, there are open-source projects continuing to work on this image compression standard. OpenJPH 0.9 was released last week as the open-source high-throughput JPEG 2000 implementation and with this new version comes even more performance gains.

It was just earlier this month that OpenJPEG 2.5 released and added high-throughput JPEG 2000 decoding while now OpenJPH that has long served as the de facto high-throughput JPEG 2000 open-source implementation is updated to deliver even better performance.

High-Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K) is for facilitating faster image decoding at the cost of slightly reduced efficiency. HTJ2K replaces the JPEG 2000 standard block coder with an alternative coder focused on vectorized performance. High-throughput JPEG 2000 Part 15 was only firmed up in 2019. HTJ2K delivers much better performance -- around 10x -or around a 30x increase for lossless coding albeit with a 5~10% coding efficiency reduction.

OpenJPH 0.9 has a 30~50% improvement in decode time or around 40~80% improvement in high-throughput JPEG 2000 decode performance. OpenJPH 0.9 has large portions of its block decoder rewritten, a SSSE3 optimized block decoder has been added, various accelerated function improvements, WebAssembly (WASM) build improvements around SIMD instruction usage, and various other enhancements.

Those interested in HTJ2K support can check out the OpenJPH 0.9 release via GitHub.