The Joint Photographic Experts Group is an ISO/CCITT working group in the process of developing an international standard for general-purpose, continous-tone, still-image cornpression. A brief history is presented as background to a surnrnary of the past year's progress, which was highlighted by definition of the overall structure of the proposed standard, and agreement on the major technical issues. This is followed by a summary and explanation of the overall algorithm structure, which consists of (1) the Baseline System, a simple coding method sufficient for many applications, (2) a set of Extended System capabilities, which extend the Baseline System to satisfy a broader range of applications, and (3) an Independent Lossless method for applications needing that type of compression only. The Baseline System, the heart of the JPEG standard, is then described in greater technical detail. The paper closes with a summary of the current status of the JPEG committee, and the target schedule toward standardization.