JBIG is a lossless image compression standard from the Joint Bi-level Image Experts Group, standardized as ISO/IEC standard 11544 and as ITU-T recommendation T.82. Now that the newer bi-level image compression standard JBIG2 has been released, JBIG is also known as JBIG1. JBIG was designed for compression of binary images, particularly for faxes, but can also be used on other images. In most situations JBIG offers between a 20% and 50% increase in compression efficiency over the Fax Group 4 standard, and in some situations, it offers a 30-fold improvement.

JBIG uses a form of arithmetic coding patented by IBM known as the Q-coder. It bases the probabilities of each bit on the previous bits and the previous lines of the picture. In order to allow compressing and decompressing images in scanning order, it does not reference future bits. JBIG also supports progressive transmission with small (around 5%) overheads.

External links

• JBIG-KIT – a free C implementation of the JBIG encoder and decoder