Reply to comment

You are wrong about JPEG 2000.

Patents:
The patented technology used in the base standard (Part 1 - which is the pure JPEG2000) is available license and royalty fee free, which is guaranteed by the ITU-Ts patent policy. The patent holders participated in the procedure of standardizing the system and as such had to agree that they provide these techniques freely for the purpose of implementing a JPEG 2000 system.

Embedding:
The algorithm can well be adapted to embedded systems (dedicated processors, whatever) and there are already systems available (e.g. http://bapis.de/en_areas.htm quote "In this case up to 500ipm DIN A4/200dpi can be JPEG2000 compressed"). See also "Hardware acceleration of JPEG2000..." on http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&id=783143.
By the way, JPEG2000 is already used on every german identification cards (saving the photo on the chip of the card).

The actual problem is the availability of open source libraries. Jasper seems to be a bad implementation, indeed taking too much resources. The problem lies in the EBCOT (Embedded Block Coding with optimized Truncation) part, not the wavelet part. The algorithm should e.g. be perfect for fast preview extraction, contrary to JPEG. Perhaps with the rise of OpenJPEG (http://www.openjpeg.org/) it gets better.