The growing demand for interactive multimedia technologies, in various application domains in this era of wireless and Internet communication, necessitated a number of desirable properties to be included in image and video compression algorithms. Accordingly, current and future generation image compression algorithms should not only demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, it should also provide desirable functionalities such as progressive transmission in terms of image fidelity as well as resolution, scalability, region-of-in terest coding, random access, error resilience, handling large-size images of different types, etc. Many of these desired functionalities are not easily achievable by the current JPEG standard. The algorithms to implement different modes of the current JPEG standard are independent from each other. The lossless compression algorithm in current JPEG standard is completely different from the lossy compression mode and also the progressive and hierarchical modes. JPEG2000 is the new still image compression standard that has been developed under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The systems architecture of this new standard has been defined in such a unified manner that it offers a single unified algorithmic framework and a single syntax definition of the code-stream organization so that different modes of operations can be handled by the same algorithm and the same syntax definition offers the aforementioned desirable functionalities. Moreover, the JPEG standard was defined in 1980s before the emergence of the Internet age. Many developments since then have changed the nature of research terest coding, random access, error resilience, handling large-size images of different types, etc. Many of these desired functionalities are not easily achievable by the current JPEG standard. The algorithms to implement different modes of the current JPEG standard are independent from each other. The lossless compression algorithm in current JPEG standard is completely different from the lossy compression mode and also the progressive and hierarchical modes. JPEG2000 is the new still image compression standard that has been developed under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The systems architecture of this new standard has been defined in such a unified manner that it offers a single unified algorithmic framework and a single syntax definition of the code-stream organization so that different modes of operations can be handled by the same algorithm and the same syntax definition offers the aforementioned desirable functionalities. Moreover, the JPEG standard was defined in 1980s before the emergence of the Internet age. Many developments since then have changed the nature of research