JPEG 2000 is a wavelet-based image compression standard. It was created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group committee in the year 2000 with the intention of superseding their original discrete cosine transform-based JPEG standard (created about 1991). The standardized filename extension is .jp2 for ISO/IEC 15444-1 conforming files and .jpx for the extended part-2 specifications, published as ISO/IEC 15444-2, while the MIME type is image/jp2.
JPEG 2000 requires far greater decompression time than JPEG and allows more sophisticated progressive downloads, yet averages similar compression rates. JPEG 2000 becomes increasingly blurred with higher compression ratios rather than generating JPEG's "blocking and ringing" artifacts, complicating direct comparison of their respective compression rates. Images machine-judged to be of equivalent quality for both compression schemes often look better to humans in JPEG 2000 at low bitrates.
Part of JPEG 2000 has been published as an ISO standard, ISO/IEC 15444-1:2000. As of 2007, JPEG 2000 is not widely supported in web browsers, and hence is not generally used on the World Wide Web. Even though provisions have been made to integrate all kinds of external meta-data, there is currently no accepted way to embed Exif data (although a JPEG 2000 "JpgTiffExif->JP2" UUID box to store EXIF information has been proposed, and is implemented by ExifTool version 6.92 or later).
