T HIS White Paper is a brief overview of the features of the Java Advanced Imaging API; it describes the fundamental concepts of the API and itsarchitecture. This document is not a complete specification of the Java Advanced ImagingAPI; many subsidiary methods and convenience methods are not described andsome details in the code examples have been omitted for clarity. Similarly,depictions of the various object hierarchies have been simplified for illustrativepurposes. Intended Audience It is assumed in this document that the reader is relatively sophisticatedconcerning the principles and practices of object-oriented programming and hasa good working knowledge of image processing and the requirements of imageprocessing applications in some problem domain. Knowledge of the Javaprogramming language and the core Java Development Environment classes (inparticular the java.awt and java.awt.image packages) is also assumed, although a brief overview of these topics is given at the beginning of Chapter 2.