This Recommendation | International Standard is applicable to continuous-tone — grayscale or colour — digital still image data. It is applicable to a wide range of applications which require use of compressed images.

This Recommendation | International Standard:

• defines extensions [including variable quantization, selective refinement, tiling, and a Still Picture Interchange File Format (SPIFF)] to processes for converting Source image data to compressed image data;
• defines extensions to processes for converting compressed image data to reconstructed image data;
• defines coded representations for compressed image data;
• gives guidance and examples on how to implement these extensions in practice;
• describes compliance tests for these extensions.