Aware, Inc. Announces JPEG 2000 Compliant Image Compression Software Products; The Benefits of Wavelet Compression in a New ISO/ITU Standard.

Business/Technology Editors

BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 8, 2001

Aware, Inc., a pioneer in wavelet based image and data compression technology, today announced a fully featured and fully compliant software implementation of the new ISO/ITU still image compression standard, JPEG 2000.

"As an approved international standard, JPEG 2000 eliminates problems associated with incorporating proprietary compression and file formats into a system. The benefits of wavelet based image compression are now available to a much larger population of users and systems," said Robert Mungovan, vice president of Aware's compression group.

The JPEG 2000 standard, approved in January 2001, provides file sizes that are 40-60% smaller than traditional JPEG images. The new standard also provides lossy and lossless modes and progressive encoding/decoding by resolution, fidelity, region of interest and color component. It includes error resilience for noisy channels.

The layered file format can eliminate the need to maintain several different resolution versions of the same image in a database. Images of smaller dimensions can be extracted from a single JPEG 2000 compressed file. Additionally, the new layered file format is better suited to streaming still frames over the Internet. A browser can display the image more quickly because the whole compressed file does not have to be received to display a version of the image. As the browser receives more of the file, a higher fidelity or higher resolution version of the image will be displayed.

Continuing, Mr. Mungovan said, "Wavelet based image compression has been recognized as better than JPEG since the late 1980s because it yields smaller file sizes or higher fidelity images. Aware has a successful track record of providing wavelet compression technology and software into niche markets where image fidelity is of tantamount importance."

Aware's JPEG 2000 software offering includes:

--a software development kit with a flexible application programming interface and example utilities with source code;

--a web solution with browser plugins for Netscape, Internet Explorer and Pocket IE that take advantage of the standard;

--a "smart reformatter" which converts most existing file types to JPEG 2000 format and provides conversion between the different JPEG 2000 encoding schemes (resolution, quality, region of interest, lossy/lossless).

Aware will demonstrate a "smart card" version of JPEG 2000 at CardTech/SecureTech in Las Vegas (Aware Booth #2837), May 15-17. The Aware demonstration will illustrate how a full resolution 24-bit ID card photo can be compressed to a file size of 1-2 Kbytes in JPEG 2000 standard compliant format. The demonstration will also show how the images can be efficiently streamed to a wireless handheld computer, and then displayed, zoomed, panned and scrolled.

About Aware

Aware, Inc. designs, develops, licenses and markets DSL technology that enables broadband communications over existing telephone networks. Its solutions, including splitterless G.lite, full-rate ADSL, VeDSL(TM), Dr. DSL(R) and DMTflex(TM), address central office as well as consumer electronics requirements. The company licenses its intellectual property and software to semiconductor manufacturers and equipment manufacturers who sell products incorporating Aware's technology. Aware also markets to systems companies to encourage them to design its technology into their products, and to service providers to encourage them to deploy new broadband services based on its technology.

Aware, Inc. also designs, develops, licenses and markets a variety of wavelet transform-based data compression software products. Its solutions enable digital image, video and certain types of data to be compressed to between 1% and 10% of their original size for applications in law enforcement, multimedia, the oil and gas industry and medical image transmission. More information about Aware can be found at http://www.aware.com.

Safe Harbor Warning

Portions of this release contain forward-looking statements regarding future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties, such as estimates or projections of future revenue and earnings and the growth of the DSL market. Aware wishes to caution you that there are factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results indicated by such statements. These factors include, but are not limited to: we have a unique business model, our quarterly results are difficult to predict, we depend on a limited number of licensees, we derive a significant amount of revenue from one customer, we depend on equipment companies to incorporate our technology into their products, we face intense competition from other DSL vendors, DSL technology competes with other technologies for broadband access, our business is subject to rapid technological change, and we will require additional engineering personnel. We refer you to the documents Aware files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically the section titled Factors That May Affect Future Results in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2000 and other reports and filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.