JPEG: Still Image Data Compression Standard (Digital Multimedia Standards S)

Received the book rather quickly. The book is not very recent but the content is enough to get programmers on the way. More up to date documentation is required to build a more accurate interface. Hats off to the people who worked on this book.

One great feature of this book is the classification of paragraphs having differing degrees of Mathematical insight. I have a minor in Math, and mostly use the easy paragraphs, sometimes the middle-difficulty, and rarely the abstruse. I've seen experts start to wave their hands sometimes. With RAW files one may no longer need .JPG.

This book is not for everyone. It is a dense tome some 4cm thick. It assumes some advanced mathematics and it is not an easy read. It is however without doubt the most complete reference book on the JPEG image encoding standard and includes details, flowcharts, samples and test cases that allow implementors to check and modify JPEG codecs. If you need to modify internals of a JPEG codec then at some stage you will need to buy this book. The shocking pink cover is not easy on the eyes and illustrations are monochrome but with those minor reservations I heartily recommend it. I bought a secondhand copy as I need it to work from and do not need an expensive mint edition for that! It provides some history and context and complete details of all the obscure variants defined by the standard including some that are seldom seen implemented. Some parts like modem speeds have dated but the fundamentals are still very sound nearly two decades later.If you are looking for a simpler and cheaper introduction to the mathematics and sample code behind image encoding then John Miano's  Compressed Image File Formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, XBM, BMP (ACM Press)  is an easier read despite having the odd typo. That book includes a sample code CD and covers several other image encoding schemes as well. But it only handles the most common JPEG compressed streams whereas this book "JPEG Still Image Data Compression Standard" is encyclopedic and three times the size. Compressed Image File Formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, XBM, BMP (ACM Press)

This is a reprint of the original JPEG book. Unfortunately, the publisher has scanned in the original. As a result, all of the photographs that are supposed to show the compression behavior and artifacts, show the scanned halftone artifacts instead.Get the original book if you possibly can.

It appears that neither author is a mathematician. The basics are stated correctly, but then the book goes into "fast" encoding and decoding algorithms which don't work because the underlying mathematics is incorrect. The book forced me to look at the mathematics very carefully so that I now understand it all and have working algorithms.