I’ve recently had need for a C++ library for encoding/decoding images. I did some research and found many options. I had a particular need to compress 16 bit grayscale (grayscale) images. Several formats say in documentation that they support it. The only format I could find that actually supported this is JPEG2000. Honestly I had never even heard of the format before about a year ago. But it is seems to be very slowly gaining in acceptance.

I first tried the Jasper library. Not sure if this is still being supported. But I’ve recently discovered OpenJPEG. It is fast, light, open source and seems to still be under active support/development. Check it out at OpenJPEG