Category Archives: Standards

MPEG Column: Press release for the 104th MPEG meeting

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Multimedia ecosystem event focuses on a broader scope of MPEG standards

The 104th MPEG meeting was held in Incheon, Korea, from 22 January to 26 April 2013.

MPEG hosts Multimedia Ecosystem 2013 Event

During its 104th meeting, MPEG has hosted the MPEG Multimedia Ecosystem event to raise awareness of MPEG’s activities in areas not directly related to compression. In addition to world class standards for compression technologies, MPEG has developed media-related standards that enrich the use of multimedia such as MPEG-M for Multimedia Service Platform Technologies, MPEG-U for Rich Media User Interfaces, and MPEG-V for interfaces between real and virtual worlds. Also, new activities such as MPEG Augmented Reality Application Format, Compact Descriptors for Visual Search, Green MPEG for energy efficient media coding, and MPEG User Description are currently in progress. The event was organized with two sessions including a workshop and demonstrations. The workshop session introduced the seven standards described above while the demonstration session showed 17 products based on these standards.

MPEG issues CfP for Energy-Efficient Media Consumption (Green MPEG)

At the 104th MPEG meeting, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) on energy-efficient media consumption (Green MPEG) which is available in the public documents section at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/. Green MPEG is envisaged to provide interoperable solutions for energy- efficient media decoding and presentation as well as energy-efficient media encoding based on encoder resources or receiver feedback. The CfP solicits responses that use compact signaling to facilitate reduced consumption from the encoding, decoding and presentation of media content without any degradation in the Quality of Experience (QoE). When power levels are critically low, consumers may prefer to sacrifice their QoE for reduced energy consumption. Green MPEG will provide this capability by allowing energy consumption to be traded off with the QoE. Responses to the call are due at the 105th MPEG meeting in July 2013.

APIs enable access to other MPEG technologies via MXM

The MPEG eXtensible Middleware (MXM) API technology specifications (ISO/IEC 23006-2) have reached the status of International Standard at the 104th MPEG meeting. MXM specifies the means to access individual MPEG tools through standardized APIs and is expected to help the creation of a global market of MXM applications that can run on devices supporting MXM APIs in addition to the other MPEG technologies. The MXM standard should also help the deployment of innovative business models because it will enable the easy design and implementation of media-handling value chains. The standard also provides reference software as open source with a business friendly license. The introductory part of the MXM family of specifications, 23006-1 MXM architecture and technologies, will soon be also freely available on the ISO web site.

MPEG introduces MPEG 101 with multimedia

MPEG has taken a further step toward communicating information about its standards in an easy and user- friendly manner; i.e. MPEG 101 with multimedia. MPEG 101 with multimedia will provide video clips containing overviews of individual standards along with explanations of the benefits that can be achieved by each standard, and will be available from the MPEG web site (http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/). During this 104th MPEG meeting, the first video clip on the Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) standard has been prepared. USAC is the newest MPEG Audio standard, which was issued in 2012. It provides performance as good as or better than state-of-the-art codecs that are designed specifically for a single class of content, such as just speech or just music, and it does so for any content type, such as speech, music or a mix of speech and music. Over its target operating bit rate, 12 kb/s for mono signals through 32 kb/s for stereo signals,USAC provides significantly better performance than the benchmarkcodecs, and continues to provide better performance as the bitrate is increased to higher rates. MPEG will employ the MPEG 101 with multimedia communication tool to other MPEG standards in near future.

Digging Deeper – How to Contact MPEG

Communicating the large and sometimes complex array of technology that the MPEG Committee has developed is not a simple task. Experts, past and present, have contributed a series of tutorials and vision documents that explain each of these standards individually. The repository is growing with each meeting, so if something you are interested is not yet there, it may appear shortly – but you should also not hesitate to request it. You can start your MPEG adventure at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/

Further Information

Future MPEG meetings are planned as follows:

  • No. 105, Vienna, AT, 29 July – 2 August 2013
  • No. 106, Geneva, CH, 28 October – 1 November 2013
  • No. 107, San Jose, CA, USA, 13 – 17 January 2014
  • No. 108, Valencia, ES, 31 March – 04 April 2014

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

Dr. Arianne T. Hinds
Cable Television Laboratories 858
Coal Creek Circle Lousiville, Colorado 80027, USA
Tel: +1 303 661 3419
a.hinds@cablelabs.com.

The MPEG homepage also has links to other MPEG pages that are maintained by the MPEG subgroups. It also contains links to public documents that are freely available for download by those who are not MPEG members. Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email should contact Dr. Arianne T. Hinds at a.hinds@cablelabs.com.

MPEG Column: 103rd MPEG Meeting

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— original post by Multimedia Communication blog, Christian Timmerer, AAU

 

The 103rd MPEG Meeting

The 103rd MPEG meeting was held in Geneva, Switzerland, January 21-15, 2013. The official press release can be found here (doc only) and I’d like to introduce the new MPEG-H standard (ISO/IEC 23008) referred to as high efficiency coding and media delivery in heterogeneous environments:

  • Part 1: MPEG Media Transport (MMT) – status: 2nd committee draft (CD)
  • Part 2: High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) – status: final draft international standard (FDIS)
  • Part 3: 3D Audio – status: call for proposals (CfP)

MPEG Media Transport (MMT)

The MMT project was started in order to address the needs of modern media transport applications going beyond the capabilities offered by existing means of transportation such as formats defined by MPEG-2 transport stream (M2TS) or ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) group of standards. The committee draft was approved during the 101st MPEG meeting. As a response to the CD ballot, MPEG received more than 200 comments from national bodies and, thus, decided to issue the 2nd committee draft which will be publicly available by February 7, 2013.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) – ITU-T H.265 | MPEG HEVC

HEVC is the next generation video coding standard jointly developed by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) and the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of ITU-T WP 3/16. Please note that both ITU-T and ISO/IEC MPEG use the term “high efficiency video coding” in the the title of the standard but one can expect – as with its predecessor – that the former will use ITU-T H.265 and the latter will use MPEG-H HEVC for promoting its standards. If you don’t want to participate in this debate, simply use high efficiency video coding.

The MPEG press release says that the “HEVC standard reduces by half the bit rate needed to deliver high-quality video for a broad variety of applications” (note: compared to its predecessor AVC). The editing period for the FDIS goes until March 3, 2013 and then with the final preparations and a 2 month balloting period (yes|no vote only) once can expect the International Standard (IS) to be available early summer 2013. Please note that there are no technical differences between FDIS and IS.

The ITU-T press release describes HEVC as a standard that “will provide a flexible, reliable and robust solution, future-proofed to support the next decade of video. The new standard is designed to take account of advancing screen resolutions and is expected to be phased in as high-end products and services outgrow the limits of current network and display technology.”

HEVC currently defines three profiles:

  • Main Profile for the “Mass-market consumer video products that historically require only 8 bits of precision”.
  • Main 10 Profile “will support up to 10 bits of processing precision for applications with higher quality demands”.
  • Main Still Picture Profile to support still image applications, hence, “HEVC also advances the state-of-the-art for still picture coding”

3D Audio

The 3D audio standard shall complement MMT and HEVC assuming that in a “home theater” system a large number of loudspeakers will be deployed. Therefore, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) with the selection of the reference model v0 due in July 2013. The CfP says that MPEG-H 3D Audio “might be surrounding the user and be situated at high, mid and low vertical positions relative to the user’s ears. The desired sense of audio envelopment includes both immersive 3D audio, in the sense of being able to virtualize sound sources at any position in space, and accurate audio localization, in terms of both direction and distance.”

“In addition to a “home theater” audio-visual system, there may be a “personal” system having a tablet-sized visual display with speakers built into the device, e.g. around the perimeter of the display. Alternatively, the personal device may be a hand-held smart phone. Headphones with appropriate spatialization would also be a means to deliver an immersive audio experience for all systems.”

Complementary to the CfP, MPEG also provided the encoder input format for MPEG-H 3D audio and a draft MPEG audio core experiment methodology for 3D audio work.

Publicly available MPEG output documents

The following documents shall be come available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/ (note: some may have an editing period – YY/MM/DD). If you have difficulties to access one of these documents, please feel free to contact me.

  • Study text of DIS of ISO/IEC 23000-13, Augmented Reality Application Format (13/01/25)
  • Study text of DTR of ISO/IEC 23000-14, Augmented reality reference model (13/02/25)
  • Text of ISO/IEC FDIS 23005-1 2nd edition Architecture (13/01/25)
  • Text of ISO/IEC 2nd CD 23008-1 MPEG Media Transport (13/02/07)
  • Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:201x/PDAM1 Range Extensions (13/03/22)
  • Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:201x/PDAM2 Multiview Extensions (13/03/22)
  • Call for Proposals on 3D Audio (13/01/25)
  • Encoder Input Format for MPEG-H 3D Audio (13/02/08)
  • Draft MPEG Audio CE methodology for 3D Audio work (13/01/25)
  • Draft Requirements on MPEG User Descriptions (13/02/08)
  • Draft Call for Proposals on MPEG User Descriptions (13/01/25)
  • Draft Call for Proposals on Green MPEG (13/01/25)
  • Context, Objectives, Use Cases and Requirements for Green MPEG (13/01/25)
  • White Paper on State of the Art in compression and transmission of 3D Video (13/01/28)
  • MPEG Awareness Event Flyer at 104th MPEG meeting in Incheon (13/02/28)

MPEG Column: 102nd MPEG Meeting

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— original post by Multimedia Communication blog, Christian Timmerer, AAU

The 102nd MPEG meeting was held in Shanghai, China, October 15-19, 2012. The official press release can be found here (not yet available) and I would like to highlight the following topics:

  • Augmented Reality Application Format (ARAF) goes DIS
  • MPEG-4 has now 30 parts: Let’s welcome timed text and other visual overlays
  • Draft call for proposals for 3D audio
  • Green MPEG is progressing
  • MPEG starts a new publicity campaign by making more working documents publicly available for free

Augmented Reality Application Format (ARAF) goes DIS

MPEG’s application format dealing with augmented reality reached DIS status and is only one step away from becoming in international standard. In a nutshell, the MPEG ARAF enables to augment 2D/3D regions of scene by combining multiple/existing standards within a specific application format addressing certain industry needs. In particular, ARAF comprises three components referred to as scene, sensor/actuator, and media. The scene component is represented using a subset of MPEG-4 Part 11 (BIFS), the sensor/actuator component is defined within MPEG-V, and the media component may comprise various type of compressed (multi)media assets using different sorts of modalities and codecs.

A tutorial from Marius Preda, MPEG 3DG chair, at the Web3D conference in August 2012 is provided below.

MPEG-4 has now 30 parts

Let’s welcome timed text and other visual overlays in the family of MPEG-4 standards. Part 30 of MPEG-4 – in combination with an amendment to the ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) –  addresses the carriage of W3C TTML including its derivative SMPTE Timed Text, as well as WebVTT. The types of overlays include subtitles, captions, and other timed text and graphics. The text-based overlays include basic text and XML-based text. Additionally, the standards provides support for bitmaps, fonts, and other graphics formats such as scalable vector graphics.

Draft call for proposals for 3D audio

MPEG 3D audio is concerned about various test items ranging from 9.1 over 12.1 up to 22.1 channel configurations. A public draft call for proposals has been issued at this meeting with the goal to finalize the call and the evaluation guidelines at the next meeting. The evaluation will be conducted in two phases. Phase one for higher bitrates (1.5 Mbps to 265 kbps) is foreseen to conclude in July 2013 with the evaluation of the answers to the call and the selection of the “Reference Model 0 (RM0)” technology which will serve as a basis for the development of an 3D audio standard. The second phase targets lower bitrates (96 kbps to 48 kbps) and builds on RM0 technology after this has been documented using text and code.

Green MPEG is progressing

The idea between green MPEG is to define signaling means that enable energy efficient encoding, delivery, decoding, and/or presentation of MPEG formats (and possibly others) without the loss of Quality of Experience. Green MPEG will address this issue from an end-to-end point of view with the focus – as usual – on the decoder. However, a codec-centric design is not desirable as the energy efficiency should not be affected at the expenses of the other components of the media ecosystem. At the moment, first requirements have been defined and everyone is free to join the discussions on the email reflector within the Ad-hoc Group.

MPEG starts a new publicity campaign by making more working documents publicly available for free

As a response to national bodies comments, MPEG is starting from now on to make more documents publicly available for free. Here’s a selection of these documents which are publicly available here. Note that some may have an editing period and, thus, are not available at the of writing this blog post.

  • Text of ISO/IEC 14496-15:2010/DAM 2 Carriage of HEVC (2012/11/02)
  • Text of ISO/IEC CD 14496-30 Timed Text and Other Visual Overlays in ISO Base Media File Format (2012/11/02)
  • DIS of ISO/IEC 23000-13, Augmented Reality Application Format (2012/11/07)
  • DTR of ISO/IEC 23000-14, Augmented reality reference model (2012/11/21)
  • Study of ISO/IEC CD 23008-1 MPEG Media Transport (2012/11/12)
  • High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Test Model 9 (HM 9) Encoder Description (2012/11/30)
  • Study Text of ISO/IEC DIS 23008-2 High Efficiency Video Coding (2012/11/30)
  • Working Draft of HEVC Full Range Extensions (2012/11/02)
  • Working Draft of HEVC Conformance (2012/11/02)
  • Report of Results of the Joint Call for Proposals on Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) (2012/11/09)
  • Draft Call for Proposals on 3D Audio (2012/10/19)
  • Text of ISO/IEC 23009-1:2012 DAM 1 Support for Event Messages and Extended Audio Channel Configuration (2012/10/31)
  • Internet Video Coding Test Model (ITM) v 3.0 (2012/11/02)
  • Draft Requirements on MPEG User Descriptions (2012/10/19)
  • Draft Use Cases for MPEG User Description (Ver. 4.0) (2012/10/19)
  • Requirements on Green MPEG (2012/10/19)
  • White Paper on State of the Art in compression and transmission of 3D Video (Draft) (2012/10/19)
  • White Paper on Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (2012/11/09)

MPEG Column: 101st MPEG Meeting

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MPEG news: a report from the 101st meeting, Stockholm, Sweden

The 101st MPEG meeting in Sweden

The 101st MPEG meeting was held in Stockholm, Sweden, July 16-20, 2012. The official press release can be found here and I would like to highlight the following topics:

  • MPEG Media Transport (MMT) reaches Committee Draft (CD)
  • High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) reaches Draft International Standard (DIS)
  • MPEG and ITU-T establish JCT-3V
  • Call for Proposals: HEVC scalability extensions
  • 3D audio workshop
  • Green MPEG

MMT goes CD

The Committee Draft (CD) of MPEG-H part 1 referred to as MPEG Media Transport (MMT) has been approved and will be publicly available after an editing period which will end Sep 17th. MMT comprises the following features:

  • Delivery of coded media by concurrently using more than one delivery medium (e.g., as it is the case of heterogeneous networks).
  • Logical packaging structure and composition information to support multimedia mash-ups (e.g., multiscreen presentation).
  • Seamless and easy conversion between storage and delivery formats.
  • Cross layer interface to facilitate communication between the application layers and underlying delivery layers.
  • Signaling of messages to manage the presentation and optimized delivery of media.

This list of ‘features’ may sound very high-level but as the CD usually comprises stable technology and is publicly available, the research community is more than welcome to evaluate MPEG’s new way of media transport. Having said this, I would like to refer to the Call for Papers of  JSAC’s special issue on adaptive media streaming which is mainly focusing on DASH but investigating its relationship to MMT is definitely within the scope.

HEVCs’ next step towards completion: DIS

The approval of the Draft International Standard (DIS) brought the HEVC standard one step closer to completion. As reported previously, HEVC shows inferior performance gains compared to its predecessor and real-time software decoding on the iPad 3 (720p, 30Hz, 1.5 Mbps) has been demonstrated during the Friday plenary [1, 2]. It is expected that the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) is going to be approved at the 103rd MPEG meeting in January 21-25, 2013. If the market need for HEVC is only similar as it was when AVC was finally approved, I am wondering if one can expect first products by mid/end 2013. From a research point of view we know – and history is our witness – that improvements are still possible even if the standard has been approved some time ago. For example, the AVC standard is now available in its 7th edition as a consolidation of various amendments and corrigenda.

JCT-3V

After the Joint Video Team (JVT) which successfully developed standards such as AVC, SVC, MVC and the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), MPEG and ITU-T establish the Joint Collaborative Team on 3D Video coding extension development (JCT-3V). That is, from now on MPEG and ITU-T also joins forces in developing 3D video coding extensions for existing codecs as well as the ones under development (i.e., AVC, HEVC). The current standardization plan includes the development of AVC multi-view extensions with depth to be completed this year and I assume HEVC will be extended with 3D capabilities once the 2D version is available.

In this context it is interesting that a call for proposals for MPEG Frame Compatible (MFC) has been issued to address current deployment issues of stereoscopic videos. The requirements are available here.

Call for Proposals: SVC for HEVC

In order to address the need for higher resolutions – Ultra HDTV – and subsets thereof, JCT-VC issued a call for proposals for HEVC scalability extensions. Similar to AVC/SVC, the requirements include that the base layer should be compatible with HEVC and enhancement layers may include temporal, spatial, and fidelity scalability. The actual call, the use cases, and the requirements shall become available on the MPEG Web site.

MPEG hosts 3D Audio Workshop

Part 3 of MPEG-H will be dedicated to audio, specifically 3D audio. The call for proposals will be issues at the 102nd MPEG meeting in October 2012 and submissions will be due at the 104th meeting in April 2013. At this meeting, MPEG has hosted a 2nd workshop on 3D audio with the following speakers.

  • Frank Melchior, BBC R&D: “3D Audio? – Be inspired by the Audience!”
  • Kaoru Watanabe, NHK and ITU: “Advanced multichannel audio activity and requirements”
  • Bert Van Daele, Auro Technologies: “3D audio content production, post production and distribution and release”
  • Michael Kelly, DTS: “3D audio, objects and interactivity in games”

The report of this workshop including the presentations will be publicly available by end of August at the MPEG Web site.

What’s new: Green MPEG

Impressions from the 101st meeting

Finally, MPEG is starting to explore a new area which is currently referred to as Green MPEG addressing technologies to enable energy-efficient use of MPEG standards. Therefore, an Ad-hoc Group (AhG) was established with the following mandates:

  1. Study the requirements and use-cases for energy efficient use of MPEG technology.
  2. Solicit further evidence for the energy savings.
  3. Develop reference software for Green MPEG experimentation and upload any such software to the SVN.
  4. Survey possible solutions for energy-efficient video processing and presentation.
  5. Explore the relationship between metadata types and coding technologies.
  6. Identify new metadata that will enable additional power savings.
  7. Study system-wide interactions and implications of energy-efficient processing on mobile devices.

AhGs are usually open to the public and all discussions take place via email. To subscribe please feel free to join the email reflector.

MPEG Column: 100th MPEG Meeting

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MPEG news: a report from the 100th meeting, Geneva, CH

The official press release is available here and I’d like to highlight two topics from MPEGs’ 100th meeting in Geneva, Switzerland:

  • “MP100E“: MPEG celebrates its 100th meeting
  • Systems news: ISOBMFF 4th edition, MDS social metadata, DASH conformance/refsw et al.
  • WebVC and ARAF goes CD
  • HEVC preliminary subjective test results publicly available Read more →