Remote browsing of JPEG2000 images

JPEG2000 is a highly scalable compression standard, allowing access to image representations with a reduced resolution, a reduced quality or confined to a spatial region of interest. As such, it is well placed to play an important role in interactive imaging applications. However, the standard itself stops short of providing guidance or specific mechanisms for exploiting its scalability in such applications. We describe the JPIK (JPEG2000 interactive with Kakadu) protocol for interactive imaging with JPEG2000. Our results suggest, somewhat surprisingly, that image tiling (dividing into independently compressed sub-images), can be detrimental to effective browsing of large compressed images over low bandwidth connections.