A Virtual Media (Vmedia) JPEG 2000 Interactive Image Browser

A Vmedia JPEG 2000 interactive image browser is developed. Two key technologies make our system unique: it is the first to implement the decoder ROI access functionality of JPEG 2000, and it uses virtual media (Vmedia) protocol to manage and deliver the ROI bitstream in an efficient fashion. The user browses the image by specifying a region of interest (ROI) with spatial and resolution restriction. Only the portion of the compressed bitstream covering the current ROI is streamed. Moreover, the streaming is performed in a progressive fashion so that a coarse view of the ROI can be rendered very quickly and then gradually refined as more and more bits arrive. Vmedia greatly improves the browsing experience of large images over the slow network.