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Comprimato JPEG2000 codec Review

Author: Fyodor Serzhenko

Comprimato Systems is a video compression and processing technologies provider offering next-generation products for professional broadcasting, video editing and image compression. These are main products of Comprimato company:

• UltraJ2K™ - JPEG2000 SDK
• UltraPix™ - Accelerated video editing plugin for high resolution video: 8K, 4K, and 360° VR
• Live transcoder - GPU-powered software for professional video encoding and transcoding

What is Comprimato JPEG2000 codec

JPEG2000 codec is a software solution with implementation of JPEG2000 image compression standard. It includes both encoder and decoder. JPEG2000 algorithm is very complicated and computationally intensive, but it offers better quality in comparison with JPEG. It has great variety of features which are not available in JPEG algorithm:

• both lossy and lossless compression algorithms which are based on discrete wavelet transform
• 8-16 bit per channel compression and decompression (up to 24 bits per channel)
• support of alpha channel
• variable number of DWT decomposition levels
• sophisticated quantization
• tiling
• progressions
• variable codeblock size
• truncation algorithm
• 2K decoding from 4K source
• error resilience
• better compression
• higher PSNR

These features of JPEG2000 codec make it to be a must in medical imaging, digital cinema, geospatial imaging, live transcoding software.

Comprimato JPEG2000 codec

Comprimato Systems has created one of the first JPEG2000 codecs on GPU. Currently, JPEG2000 codec from Comprimato is capable to work on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs (Windows, Linux, MacOS) and on CPU with very high performance. It supports both CUDA and OpenCL. The key issue is the performance which is excellent. You can see performance calculator at Comprimato's site to evaluate how much frames per second you can get for specific image resolution, bit depth, subsampling and GPU model.

Pros and Cons

Comprimato JPEG2000 codec is one of the best rated solutions for high quality and high performance JPEG2000 encoding and decoding on the market.

Pro:

• High performance
• CUDA/OpenCL at Windows/Linux/MacOS
• Additional CPU-based implementation of JPEG2000 Codec

Cons:

• There is no demo on the site
• It's not clear which parameters and images were used to get benchmarks for their performance calculator
• Price on the site for JPEG2000 codec is not available

Comprimato JPEG2000 codec Alternatives

As alternatives to Comprimato JPEG2000 Codec one could recommend codecs from Kakadu and Fastvideo. These companies are competitors, though their solutions are quite different. Info about their license cost is not public either.

Kakadu developers have been working on JPEG2000 Codecs for about 20 years and they have great experience in that field. Kakadu JPEG2000 Codec is similar to many other CPU solutions, but their multithreaded codec is considered to be the fastest among all CPU-based software implementations. This is widespread JPEG2000 library with lots of customers worldwide.

Fastvideo has implemented the fastest JPEG2000 encoder on CUDA, which is many times faster than any CPU-based JPEG2000 codec, both open source and commercial. Apart from CUDA JPEG2000 Codec, Fastvideo is a developer of GPU-based Image & Video Processing SDK with super high performance and top algorithms. That SDK could be integrated into your imaging applications.

Comprimato vs Kakadu vs Fastvideo