Uniform Access to Images within Open Distributed Environments

A huge variety of (de facto) standards for image interchange, compression, and communication is employed today in different systems, applications, and environments. Within the AMICS project a framework, called Image Communication Open Architecture (ICOA) was elaborated that enables the various standards and standardization activities both in the imaging area and in the wider area of image communication to be related and the necessary support tools to be identified. Although the framework sets a clear emphasis on the handling of images, the ICOA fulfills the image communication requirements from a wide range of application areas including multimedia.