The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Joint Bi- Level Image experts Group (JBIG) are joint committees of the ITU (Telecommunications branch, ITU-T) and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG1. They have been meeting for over ten years, initially starting as a working group of SC2, responsible for character coding.

JPEG's work started as a compression scheme for photographic reproduction in videotex - perhaps a precursor to the Web. The main criteria was that the algorithm should be capable of real time decoding at ISDN delivery rates using a software solution.

JBIG's interest came about because the existing Group 3 and Group 4 facsimile coding algorithms were not as efficient as they might be, particularly for halftoned images - the JBIG standard can be as much as 100% better than these in some circumstances