CREW is a "reversible" wavelet and bit-plane lossless and lossy image compression system. CREW has been tested with images up to 12 bits deep and the syntax supports images with up to 256 components of up to 255 bits deep pixel components. It is well suited for multi-resolution applications and client/server applications. The emphasis with CREW is flexibilty without sacrificing compression performance. The feature set includes

• Both lossless and lossy compression in the same codestream
• Quantization possible at encode, transmision, and/or decode
• Excellent compression from lossless to very low bit-rate
• Progressive by resolution
• Progressive by pixel accuracy
• Lossless color conversion
• Continous-tone and/or binary images
• Fixed-rate and fixed-size
• Random access and region of interest decoding
• Device dependent parsing before transmission
• Idempotent for multiple compression/decompression cycles
• Simple to implement in both hardware and software