On 12–13 November 2026, the JPEG Committee will organise the first JPEG Trust Summit at the Alan Turing Institute in London, bringing together international experts from cultural heritage, media, industry, government, academia and standardisation.
Download the preliminary programme: JPEG Trust Summit – Preliminary Programme.
Expression of interest: JPEG Trust Summit 2026 – Expression of interest to attend
Digital media increasingly passes through complex workflows involving capture, digitisation, editing, restoration, artificial intelligence, publication and reuse. For cultural heritage organisations in particular, this raises important questions. Where does an image come from? What transformations has it undergone? Who should be attributed? What rights or conditions of use apply? And how can such information remain associated with an asset as it moves between institutions, platforms and users?
JPEG Trust addresses these challenges through a new series of international standards, ISO/IEC 21617, developed by the JPEG standardisation committee.
JPEG is best known for the image format that carries its name, but the Joint Photographic Experts Group develops a much broader family of international standards for digital imaging and multimedia. JPEG Trust builds on this experience to provide an interoperable framework for establishing trust in media.
Rather than assuming that there is a single technological solution to the problem of trustworthy media, JPEG Trust allows information from different mechanisms and sources to be combined. The framework addresses authenticity, provenance, attribution, intellectual property rights and integrity, and can incorporate technologies and information such as metadata, cryptographically secured provenance, watermarking and content-based analysis.
An important principle behind the framework is that trust is context dependent. A cultural heritage institution, a news organisation, a social media platform and a law-enforcement organisation may all have different requirements when deciding whether and how a media asset can be trusted. JPEG Trust therefore provides mechanisms to express these requirements and to communicate the resulting assessments in interoperable ways.
The work is already progressing as a multi-part series of international standards. The Core Foundation, ISO/IEC 21617-1, was first published in 2025, with a second edition published in 2026, while additional parts address Trust Profiles and Reports, media asset watermarking and reference software.
These questions are particularly relevant to photographic and cultural heritage collections. Digitisation, computational imaging and AI-assisted restoration can generate new representations and new knowledge from heritage assets, while generative AI and increasingly sophisticated editing tools make provenance, attribution and transparency more important than ever. This perspective will have a dedicated place at the JPEG Trust Summit.
The programme brings together perspectives from policy makers, standardisation organisations, intellectual property experts, news and image agencies, technology providers, researchers and other user communities.
The two-day programme will examine:
- Trust in media and the societal challenges surrounding authenticity and provenance;
- Legal and policy frameworks;
- The role and interoperability of international standards;
- Practical implementations of JPEG Trust;
- Use cases across cultural heritage, visual content, editorial media and other sectors;
- User interfaces, adoption and communication of trust information.
The Summit is conceived primarily as an in-person event, encouraging discussion and exchange between the participating communities. As capacity at the Alan Turing Institute is limited, interested participants are invited to submit an expression of interest. Online participation will also be provided for those unable to attend physically. Participants can indicate their preference for online participation in the “Additional comments” field of the expression of interest form.
Expression of interest: JPEG Trust Summit 2026 – Expression of interest to attend
