Category Archives: 0416

The 74th JPEG meeting was held at ITU Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, from 15 to 20 January featuring the following highlights:

• A Final Call for Proposals on JPEG Pleno was issued focusing on light field coding;
• Creation of a test model for the upcoming JPEG XS standard;
• A draft Call for Proposals for JPEG Privacy & Security was issued;
• JPEG AIC technical report finalized on Guidelines for image coding system evaluation;
• An AHG was created to investigate the evidence of high throughput JPEG 2000;
• An AHG on next generation image compression standard was initiated to explore a future image coding format with superior compression efficiency.

JPEG Pleno kicks off its activities towards standardization of light field coding

At the 74^th JPEG meeting in Geneva, Switzerland the final Call for Proposals (CfP) on JPEG Pleno was issued particularly focusing on light field coding. The CfP is available here.

The call encompasses coding technologies for lenslet light field cameras, and content produced by high-density arrays of cameras. In addition, system-level solutions associated with light field coding and processing technologies that have a normative impact are called for. In a later stage, calls for other modalities such as point cloud, holographic and omnidirectional data will be issued, encompassing image representations and new and rich forms of visual data beyond the traditional planar image representations.

JPEG Pleno intends to provide a standard framework to facilitate capture, representation and exchange of these omnidirectional, depth-enhanced, point cloud, light field, and holographic imaging modalities. It aims to define new tools for improved compression while providing advanced functionalities at the system level. Moreover, it targets to support data and metadata manipulation, editing, random access and interaction, protection of privacy and ownership rights as well as other security mechanisms.

JPEG XS aims at the standardization of a visually lossless low-latency lightweight compression scheme that can be used for a wide range of applications including mezzanine codec for the broadcast industry and Pro-AV markets. Targeted use cases are professional video links, IP transport, Ethernet transport, real-time video storage, video memory buffers, and omnidirectional video capture and rendering. After a Call for Proposal issued on March 11^th 2016 and the assessment of the submitted technologies, a test model for the upcoming JPEG XS standard was created during the 73rd JPEG meeting in Chengdu and the results of a first set of core experiments have been reviewed during the 74^th JPEG meeting in Geneva. More core experiments are on their way before finalizing the standard: JPEG committee therefore invites interested parties – in particular coding experts, codec providers, system integrators and potential users of the foreseen solutions – to contribute to the further specification process.

JPEG Privacy & Security aims at developing a standard for realizing secure image information sharing which is capable of ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual property rights (IPR). JPEG Privacy & Security will explore ways on how to design and implement the necessary features without significantly impacting coding performance while ensuring scalability, interoperability, and forward and backward compatibility with current JPEG standard frameworks.

A draft Call for Proposals for JPEG Privacy & Security has been issued and the JPEG committee invites interested parties to contribute to this standardisation activity in JPEG Systems. The draft of CfP is available here.

The call addresses protection mechanisms and technologies such as handling hierarchical levels of access and multiple protection levels for metadata and image protection, checking integrity of image data and embedded metadata, and supporting backward and forward compatibility with JPEG coding technologies. Interested parties are encouraged to subscribe to the JPEG Privacy & Security email reflector for collecting more information. A final version of the JPEG Privacy & Security Call for Proposals is expected at the 75th JPEG meeting located in Sydney, Australia.

JPEG AIC provides guidance and standard procedures for advanced image coding evaluation.  At this meeting JPEG completed a technical report: TR 29170-1 Guidelines for image coding system evaluation. This report is a compendium of JPEGs best practices in evaluation that draws sources from several different international standards and international recommendations. The report discusses use of objective tools, subjective procedures and computational analysis techniques and when to use the different tools. Some of the techniques are tried and true tools familiar to image compression experts and vision scientists. Several tools represent new fields where few tools have been available, such as the evaluation of coding systems for high dynamic range content.

High throughput JPEG 2000

The JPEG committee started a new activity for high throughput JPEG 2000 and an AHG was created to investigate the evidence for such kind of standard. Experts are invited to participate in this expert group and to join the mailing list.

Final Quote

“JPEG continues to offer standards that redefine imaging products and services contributing to a better society without borders.” said Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi, the Convener of the JPEG committee.

About JPEG

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a Working Group of ISO/IEC, the International Organisation for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission, (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1) and of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG16), responsible for the popular JBIG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, JPSearch and more recently, the JPEG XT, JPEG XS and JPEG Systems and JPEG PLENO families of imaging standards.

More information about JPEG and its work is available at www.jpeg.org or by contacting Antonio Pinheiro and Tim Bruylants of the JPEG Communication Subgroup at pr@jpeg.org.

If you would like to stay posted on JPEG activities, please subscribe to the jpeg-news mailing list on https://listserv.uni-stuttgart.de/mailman/listinfo/jpeg-news.   Moreover, you can follow JPEG twitter account on http://twitter.com/WG1JPEG.

Future JPEG meetings are planned as follows:

• No. 75, Sydney, AU, 26 – 31 March, 2017
• No. 76, Torino, IT, 17 – 21 July, 2017
• No. 77, Macau, CN, 23 – 27 October 2017

• MPEG issues Committee Draft of the Omnidirectional Media Application Format (OMAF)
• MPEG-H 3D Audio Verification Test Report
• MPEG Workshop on 5-Year Roadmap Successfully Held in Geneva
• Call for Proposals (CfP) for Point Cloud Compression (PCC)
• Preliminary Call for Evidence on video compression with capability beyond HEVC
• MPEG issues Committee Draft of the Media Orchestration (MORE) Standard
• Technical Report on HDR/WCG Video Coding

In this article, I’d like to focus on the topics related to multimedia communication starting with OMAF.

Omnidirectional Media Application Format (OMAF)

Real-time entertainment services deployed over the open, unmanaged Internet – streaming audio and video – account now for more than 70% of the evening traffic in North American fixed access networks and it is assumed that this figure will reach 80 percent by 2020. More and more such bandwidth hungry applications and services are pushing onto the market including immersive media services such as virtual reality and, specifically 360-degree videos. However, the lack of appropriate standards and, consequently, reduced interoperability is becoming an issue. Thus, MPEG has started a project referred to as Omnidirectional Media Application Format (OMAF). The first milestone of this standard has been reached and the committee draft (CD) has been approved at the 117th MPEG meeting. Such application formats “are essentially superformats that combine selected technology components from MPEG (and other) standards to provide greater application interoperability, which helps satisfy users’ growing need for better-integrated multimedia solutions” [MPEG-A].” In the context of OMAF, the following aspects are defined:

• Equirectangular projection format (note: others might be added in the future)
• Metadata for interoperable rendering of 360-degree monoscopic and stereoscopic audio-visual data
• Storage format: ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF)
• Codecs: High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and MPEG-H 3D audio

OMAF is the first specification which is defined as part of a bigger project currently referred to as ISO/IEC 23090 — Immersive Media (Coded Representation of Immersive Media). It currently has the acronym MPEG-I and we have previously used MPEG-VR which is now replaced by MPEG-I (that still might chance in the future). It is expected that the standard will become Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) by Q4 of 2017. Interestingly, it does not include AVC and AAC, probably the most obvious candidates for video and audio codecs which have been massively deployed in the last decade and probably still will be a major dominator (and also denominator) in upcoming years. On the other hand, the equirectangular projection format is currently the only one defined as it is broadly used already in off-the-shelf hardware/software solutions for the creation of omnidirectional/360-degree videos. Finally, the metadata formats enabling the rendering of 360-degree monoscopic and stereoscopic video is highly appreciated. A solution for MPEG-DASH based on AVC/AAC utilizing equirectangular projection format for both monoscopic and stereoscopic video is shown as part of Bitmovin’s solution for VR and 360-degree video.

Research aspects related to OMAF can be summarized as follows:

MPEG Workshop “Global Media Technology Standards for an Immersive Age”

On January 18, 2017 MPEG successfully held a public workshop on “Global Media Technology Standards for an Immersive Age” hosting a series of keynotes from Bitmovin, DVB, Orange, Sky Italia, and Technicolor. Stefan Lederer, CEO of Bitmovin discussed today’s and future challenges with new forms of content like 360°, AR and VR. All slides are available here and MPEG took their feedback into consideration in an update of its 5-year standardization roadmap. David Wood (EBU) reported on the DVB VR study mission and Ralf Schaefer (Technicolor) presented a snapshot on VR services. Gilles Teniou (Orange) discussed video formats for VR pointing out a new opportunity to increase the content value but also raising a question what is missing today. Finally, Massimo Bertolotti (Sky Italia) introduced his view on the immersive media experience age.

Overall, the workshop was well attended and as mentioned above, MPEG is currently working on a new standards project related to immersive media. Currently, this project comprises five parts. The first part comprises a technical report describing the scope (incl. kind of system architecture), use cases, and applications. The second part is OMAF (see above) and the third/forth parts are related to immersive video and audio respectively. Part five is about point cloud compression.

For those interested, please check out the slides from industry representatives in this field and draw your own conclusions what could be interesting for your own research. I’m happy to see any reactions, hints, etc. in the comments.

Finally, let’s have a look what happened related to MPEG-DASH, a topic with a long history on this blog.

MPEG-DASH and CMAF: Friend or Foe?

For MPEG-DASH and CMAF it was a meeting “in between” official standardization stages. MPEG-DASH experts are still working on the third edition which will be a consolidated version of the 2nd edition and various amendments and corrigenda. In the meantime, MPEG issues a white paper on the new features of MPEG-DASH which I would like to highlight here.

• Committee Draft MORE (note: type in ‘man more’ on any unix/linux/max terminal and you’ll get ‘less – opposite of more’;): MORE stands for “Media Orchestration” and provides a specification that enables the automated combination of multiple media sources (cameras, microphones) into a coherent multimedia experience. Additionally, it targets use cases where a multimedia experience is rendered on multiple devices simultaneously, again giving a consistent and coherent experience.
• Technical Report on HDR/WCG Video Coding: This technical report comprises conversion and coding practices for High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wide Colour Gamut (WCG) video coding (ISO/IEC 23008-14). The purpose of this document is to provide a set of publicly referenceable recommended guidelines for the operation of AVC or HEVC systems adapted for compressing HDR/WCG video for consumer distribution applications
• CfP Point Cloud Compression (PCC): This call solicits technologies for the coding of 3D point clouds with associated attributes such as color and material properties. It will be part of the immersive media project introduced above.
• MPEG-H 3D Audio verification test report: This report presents results of four subjective listening tests that assessed the performance of the Low Complexity Profile of MPEG-H 3D Audio. The tests covered a range of bit rates and a range of “immersive audio” use cases (i.e., from 22.2 down to 2.0 channel presentations). Seven test sites participated in the tests with a total of 288 listeners.

The next MPEG meeting will be held in Hobart, April 3-7, 2017. Feel free to contact us for any questions or comments.

MPEG Workshop on 5-Year Roadmap Successfully Held in Chengdu

Chengdu, China – The 116^th MPEG meeting was held in Chengdu, China, from 17 – 21 October 2016

MPEG Workshop on 5-Year Roadmap Successfully Held in Chengdu

At its 116^th meeting, MPEG successfully organised a workshop on its 5-year standardisation roadmap. Various industry representatives presented their views and reflected on the need for standards for new services and applications, specifically in the area of immersive media. The results of the workshop (roadmap, presentations) and the planned phases for the standardisation of “immersive media” are available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/. A follow-up workshop will be held on 18 January 2017 in Geneva, co-located with the 117^th MPEG meeting. The workshop is open to all interested parties and free of charge. Details on the program and registration will be available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/.

Summary of the “Survey on Virtual Reality”

At its 115^th meeting, MPEG established an ad-hoc group on virtual reality which conducted a survey on virtual reality with relevant stakeholders in this domain. The feedback from this survey has been provided as input for the 116^th MPEG meeting where the results have been evaluated. Based on these results, MPEG aligned its standardisation timeline with the expected deployment timelines for 360-degree video and virtual reality services. An initial specification for 360-degree video and virtual reality services will be ready by the end of 2017 and is referred to as the Omnidirectional Media Application Format (OMAF; MPEG-A Part 20, ISO/IEC 23000-20). A standard addressing audio and video coding for 6 degrees of freedom where users can freely move around is on MPEG’s 5-year roadmap. The summary of the survey on virtual reality is available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/.

MPEG and ISO/TC 276/WG 5 have collected and evaluated the answers to the Genomic Information Compression and Storage joint Call for Proposals

At its 115^th meeting, MPEG issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) for Genomic Information Compression and Storage in conjunction with the working group for standardisation of data processing and integration of the ISO Technical Committee for biotechnology standards (ISO/TC 276/WG5). The call sought submissions of technologies that can provide efficient compression of genomic data and metadata for storage and processing applications. During the 116^th MPEG meeting, responses to this CfP have been collected and evaluated by a joint ad-hoc group of both working groups, comprising twelve distinct technologies submitted. An initial assessment of the performance of the best eleven solutions for the different categories reported compression factors ranging from 8 to 58 for the different classes of data.

The submitted twelve technologies show consistent improvements versus the results assessed as an answer to the Call for Evidence in February 2016. Further improvements of the technologies under consideration are expected with the first phase of core experiments that has been defined at the 116^th MPEG meeting. The open core experiments process planned in the next 12 months will address multiple, independent, directly comparable rigorous experiments performed by independent entities to determine the specific merit of each technology and their mutual integration into a single solution for standardisation. The core experiment process will consider submitted technologies as well as new solutions in the scope of each specific core experiment. The final inclusion of submitted technologies into the standard will be based on the experimental comparison of performance, as well as on the validation of requirements and inclusion of essential metadata describing the context of the sequence data, and will be reached by consensus within and across both committees.

Call for Proposals: Internet of Media Things and Wearables (IoMT&W)

At its 116^th meeting, MPEG issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) for Internet of Media Things and Wearables (see http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/), motivated by the understanding that more than half of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element of the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020. Therefore, the CfP seeks submissions of protocols and data representation enabling dynamic discovery of media things and media wearables. A standard in this space will facilitate the large-scale deployment of complex media systems that can exchange data in an interoperable way between media things and media wearables.

MPEG-DASH Amendment with Media Presentation Description Chaining and Pre-Selection of Adaptation Sets

At its 116^th MPEG meeting, a new amendment for MPEG-DASH reached the final stage of Final Draft Amendment (ISO/IEC 23009-1:2014 FDAM 4). This amendment includes several technologies useful for industry practices of adaptive media presentation delivery. For example, the media presentation description (MPD) can be daisy chained to simplify implementation of pre-roll ads in cases of targeted dynamic advertising for live linear services. Additionally, support for pre-selection in order to signal suitable combinations of audio elements that are offered in different adaptation sets is enabled by this amendment. As there have been several amendments and corrigenda produced, this amendment will be published as a part of the 3^rd edition of ISO/IEC 23009-1 together with the amendments and corrigenda approved after the 2^nd edition.

How to contact MPEG, learn more, and find other MPEG facts

To learn about MPEG basics, discover how to participate in the committee, or find out more about the array of technologies developed or currently under development by MPEG, visit MPEG’s home page at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org. There you will find information publicly available from MPEG experts past and present including tutorials, white papers, vision documents, and requirements under consideration for new standards efforts. You can also find useful information in many public documents by using the search window.

Examples of tutorials that can be found on the MPEG homepage include tutorials for: High Efficiency Video Coding, Advanced Audio Coding, Universal Speech and Audio Coding, and DASH to name a few. A rich repository of white papers can also be found and continues to grow. You can find these papers and tutorials for many of MPEG’s standards freely available. Press releases from previous MPEG meetings are also available. Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email should contact Dr. Christian Timmerer at christian.timmerer@itec.uni-klu.ac.at or christian.timmerer@bitmovin.com.

Further Information

Future MPEG meetings are planned as follows:
No. 117, Geneva, CH, 16 – 20 January, 2017
No. 118, Hobart, AU, 03 – 07 April, 2017
No. 119, Torino, IT, 17 – 21 July, 2017
No. 120, Macau, CN, 23 – 27 October 2017

For further information about MPEG, please contact:
Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione (Convenor of MPEG, Italy)
Via Borgionera, 103
10040 Villar Dora (TO), Italy
Tel: +39 011 935 04 61
leonardo@chiariglione.org

or

Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Timmerer
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt | Bitmovin Inc.
9020 Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria, Europe
Tel: +43 463 2700 3621
Email: christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at | christian.timmerer@bitmovin.com