The joint photographic experts group (JPEG) committee (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1) is currently pursuing the standardization of a three-dimensional extension of the JPEG-2000 standard (Parts 1 and 2) to support the encoding of volumetric data sets. This extension, Part 10 - extensions for three-dimensional data (JP3D), will support functionalities like resolution scalability, quality scalability and region-of-interest coding, while exploiting the entropy in the additional third dimension to improve the rate-distortion performance. In this paper, we give an overview of the markets and application areas targeted by JP3D, the imposed requirements and the algorithm under study