Enhanced transmission of JPEG2000 imagery through JPIP proxy and user-navigation model

The efficient transmission of large resolution images is a key aspect in many applications to minimize the transmission costs and to enhance the browsing experience. Among the currently available standards for the coding and transmission of imagery, JPEG2000 excels for its superior coding performance and advanced capabilities. The JPEG2000 Interactive Protocol (JPIP) minimizes the amount of information transmitted in a client-server scenario. Nonetheless, JPIP does not provide mechanisms to re-use data already delivered to clients browsing the same image within a local network. Common HTTP proxy servers are not able to understand the syntax of JPIP, thus specialized JPIP proxy servers are put in practice. This work improves the capabilities of traditional JPIP proxy servers by means of a user-navigation model that, together with prefetching strategies, allows the server to anticipate (potential) future requests of clients. Experimental evidence indicates that the introduction of the navigational model into a JPIP proxy server enhances the browsing experience notably.