The ImageGear JPEG 2000 Component allows you to create an imaging application, supporting JPEG 2000 standard (Part I) and JPEG 2000 extensions (Part II) formats.
The JPEG 2000 standard provides a set of features that are of importance to many high-end and emerging applications by taking advantage of new technologies. It addresses areas where other standards fail to produce the best quality or performance and provides capabilities to markets that currently do not use compression. The markets and applications better served by the JPEG 2000 standard are Internet, color facsimile, printing, scanning (consumer and pre-press), digital photography, remote sensing, mobile, medical imagery, digital libraries / archives and E-commerce.
The standard allows creating raw JPEG 2000 codestream files, which only contain compressed data and the minimal necessary headers, as well as JP2-compatible files, which contain additional information about image color space, resolution, and some text metadata fields.
The JPEG 2000 Standard Part II defines an extended format called JPX. This format defines numerous extensions, which include support for different color spaces (like CMYK), advanced support for transparent channels and additional metadata elements.
More information about JP2 and JPX is available at http://www.jpeg.org/JPEG2000.html.