Kakadu Software

Kakadu Software is the leading provider of JPEG 2000 source codes including part 1 and part 15 (HTJ2K). 

Kakadu’s SDK (J2K1 ) has been used by the motion picture industry for more than a decade providing extraordinary performance  to all its licensees.  This is a highly resilient code with the richest feature sets of any standard, including scalability, region-of-interest accessibility, and non-iterative optimal rate control.

Kakadu Software has added Kakadu HT (its implementation of the royalty free HTJ2K – part 15 of the JPEG  2000 standards) to its offerings to provide even faster processing throughputs. HTJ2K introduces an alternative block coding algorithm that allows extremely high processing throughputs, while preserving key aspects of the JPEG 2000 framework. HTJ2K is already included in Application 2 of SMPTE's Interoperable Master Format, which is used by studios for their movie/TV masters,  (see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10064378) 

HTJ2K standard has been developed with a strong focus on compatibility with the existing JPEG 2000 ecosystem. In particular, HTJ2K and part1 block bit-streams are reversibly interchangeable, meaning that content encoded using the original J2K1 algorithm can be transcoded to use the much faster HT representation without losing any information. Further HT block bit-streams can be transcoded back to the J2K1 representation, again without any mathematical loss.

This feature allows existing J2K1 based media repositories to be migrated to the HTJ2K format where desirable, without any risk of information loss. Furthermore, HTJ2K offers order of-magnitude increases in throughput on common CPU and GPU platforms, while also enabling very high throughput hardware systems, including all-on-chip solutions (no external memory) on common FPGA platforms. These innovations allow high bandwidth media to be practically encoded and decoded with much less working memory and much lower latencies.

Kakadu Software is pleased to meet with you and demonstrate the performance of its low latency HTJ2K solutions.