In this thesis a new capability - remote image browsing built upon our existing music telepresence platform is introduced. The implementation of this new image capability has two parts: one part is the local image viewing and the other part is distributed image-view interaction. Image viewing part is realized using the foundation of Linux GTK+ library. Most popular lossless and lossy image coding formats such as GIF, PNG, BMP and JPEG are supported currently. Image viewing part also provides several image operations such as: zoom in and zoom out, image information display and moreover users can select their own regions of interest to zoom in and view. Distributed image-view interaction uses TCP protocol to provide reliable image data packets delivery and browsing. The prototype system enables two users in the remote session to view exactly the same region of interest of the image. Furthermore, remote image browsing capability is enhanced with the other existing capabilities, such as text messaging, low latency audio and video interactions to construct a fully-fledged interactive environment for users to collaborate remotely.
Additionally, this thesis also closely evaluates the algorithms and techniques within the new image compression standard JPEG 2000 for their applicability in a distributed collaborative system. Specifically, compression ratio, encoding time and decoding details of two official JPEG 2000 testing images are analyzed by using an available open source JPEG 2000 codec implementation-OPENJPEG project. It is found that compression ratio is not a critical factor to affect the encoding time if an image is encoded with only one tile option. Among the four decoding steps, tier-1 coding which includes three passes: significance pass, refinement pass, cleanup pass and entropy coding consumes the most decoding time. Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transformation needs second most time. Multi component transformation consumes third most decoding time and tier-2 coding requires the least time to finish. These results may set guide-lines for future adoption of the new JPEG 2000 image compression techniques in our prototype system.