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MPEG Column: 120th MPEG Meeting in Macau, China

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The original blog post can be found at the Bitmovin Techblog and has been updated here to focus on and highlight research aspects.

MPEG Plenary Meeting

MPEG Plenary Meeting

The MPEG press release comprises the following topics:

  • Point Cloud Compression – MPEG evaluates responses to call for proposal and kicks off its technical work
  • The omnidirectional media format (OMAF) has reached its final milestone
  • MPEG-G standards reach Committee Draft for compression and transport technologies of genomic data
  • Beyond HEVC – The MPEG & VCEG call to set the next standard in video compression
  • MPEG adds better support for mobile environment to MMT
  • New standard completed for Internet Video Coding
  • Evidence of new video transcoding technology using side streams

Point Cloud Compression

At its 120th meeting, MPEG analysed the technologies submitted by nine industry leaders as responses to the Call for Proposals (CfP) for Point Cloud Compression (PCC). These technologies address the lossless or lossy coding of 3D point clouds with associated attributes such as colour and material properties. Point clouds are referred to as unordered sets of points in a 3D space and typically captured using various setups of multiple cameras, depth sensors, LiDAR scanners, etc., but can also be generated synthetically and are in use in several industries. They have recently emerged as representations of the real world enabling immersive forms of interaction, navigation, and communication. Point clouds are typically represented by extremely large amounts of data providing a significant barrier for mass market applications. Thus, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposal seeking technologies that allow reduction of point cloud data for its intended applications. After a formal objective and subjective evaluation campaign, MPEG selected three technologies as starting points for the test models for static, animated, and dynamically acquired point clouds. A key conclusion of the evaluation was that state-of-the-art point cloud compression can be significantly improved by leveraging decades of 2D video coding tools and combining 2D and 3D compression technologies. Such an approach provides synergies with existing hardware and software infrastructures for rapid deployment of new immersive experiences.

Although the initial selection of technologies for point cloud compression has been concluded at the 120th MPEG meeting, it could be also seen as a kick-off for its scientific evaluation and various further developments including the optimization thereof. It is expected that various scientific conference will focus on point cloud compression and may open calls for grand challenges like for example at IEEE ICME 2018.

Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF)

The understanding of the virtual reality (VR) potential is growing but market fragmentation caused by the lack of interoperable formats for the storage and delivery of such content stifles VR’s market potential. MPEG’s recently started project referred to as Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF) has reached Final Draft of International Standard (FDIS) at its 120th meeting. It includes

  • equirectangular projection and cubemap projection as projection formats;
  • signalling of metadata required for interoperable rendering of 360-degree monoscopic and stereoscopic audio-visual data; and
  • provides a selection of audio-visual codecs for this application.

It also includes technologies to arrange video pixel data in numerous ways to improve compression efficiency and reduce the size of video, a major bottleneck for VR applications and services. The standard also includes technologies for the delivery of OMAF content with MPEG-DASH and MMT.

MPEG has defined a format comprising a minimal set of tools to enable interoperability among implementers of the standard. Various aspects are deliberately excluded from the normative parts to foster innovation leading to novel products and services. This enables us — researcher and practitioners — to experiment with these new formats in various ways and focus on informative aspects where typically competition can be found. For example, efficient means for encoding and packaging of omnidirectional/360-degree media content and its adaptive streaming including support for (ultra-)low latency will become a big issue in the near future.

MPEG-G: Compression and Transport Technologies of Genomic Data

The availability of high throughput DNA sequencing technologies opens new perspectives in the treatment of several diseases making possible the introduction of new global approaches in public health known as “precision medicine”. While routine DNA sequencing in the doctor’s office is still not current practice, medical centers have begun to use sequencing to identify cancer and other diseases and to find effective treatments. As DNA sequencing technologies produce extremely large amounts of data and related information, the ICT costs of storage, transmission, and processing are also very high. The MPEG-G standard addresses and solves the problem of efficient and economical handling of genomic data by providing new

  • compression technologies (ISO/IEC 23092-2) and
  • transport technologies (ISO/IEC 23092-1),

which reached Committee Draft level at its 120th meeting.

Additionally, the Committee Drafts for

  • metadata and APIs (ISO/IEC 23092-3) and
  • reference software (ISO/IEC 23092-4)

are scheduled for the next MPEG meeting and the goal is to publish Draft International Standards (DIS) at the end of 2018.

This new type of (media) content, which requires compression and transport technologies, is emerging within the multimedia community at large and, thus, input is welcome.

Beyond HEVC – The MPEG & VCEG Call to set the Next Standard in Video Compression

The 120th MPEG meeting marked the first major step toward the next generation of video coding standard in the form of a joint Call for Proposals (CfP) with ITU-T SG16’s VCEG. After two years of collaborative informal exploration studies and a gathering of evidence that successfully concluded at the 118th MPEG meeting, MPEG and ITU-T SG16 agreed to issue the CfP for future video coding technology with compression capabilities that significantly exceed those of the HEVC standard and its current extensions. They also formalized an agreement on formation of a joint collaborative team called the “Joint Video Experts Team” (JVET) to work on development of the new planned standard, pending the outcome of the CfP that will be evaluated at the 122nd MPEG meeting in April 2018. To evaluate the proposed compression technologies, formal subjective tests will be performed using video material submitted by proponents in February 2018. The CfP includes the testing of technology for 360° omnidirectional video coding and the coding of content with high-dynamic range and wide colour gamut in addition to conventional standard-dynamic-range camera content. Anticipating a strong response to the call, a “test model” draft design is expected be selected in 2018, with development of a potential new standard in late 2020.

The major goal of a new video coding standard is to be better than its successor (HEVC). Typically this “better” is quantified by 50% which means, that it should be possible encode the video at the same quality with half of the bitrate or a significantly higher quality with the same bitrate including. However, at this time the “Joint Video Experts Team” (JVET) from MPEG and ITU-T SG16 faces competition from the Alliance for Open Media, which is working on AV1. In any case, we are looking forward to an exciting time frame from now until this new codec is ratified and how it will perform compared to AV1. Multimedia systems and applications will also benefit from new codecs which will gain traction as soon as first implementations of this new codec becomes available (note that AV1 is available as open source already and continuously further developed).

MPEG adds Better Support for Mobile Environment to MPEG Media Transport (MMT)

MPEG has approved the Final Draft Amendment (FDAM) to MPEG Media Transport (MMT; ISO/IEC 23008-1:2017), which is referred to as “MMT enhancements for mobile environments”. In order to reflect industry needs on MMT, which has been well adopted by broadcast standards such as ATSC 3.0 and Super Hi-Vision, it addresses several important issues on the efficient use of MMT in mobile environments. For example, it adds distributed resource identification message to facilitate multipath delivery and transition request message to change the delivery path of an active session. This amendment also introduces the concept of a MMT-aware network entity (MANE), which might be placed between the original server and the client, and provides a detailed description about how to use it for both improving efficiency and reducing delay of delivery. Additionally, this amendment provides a method to use WebSockets to setup and control an MMT session/presentation.

New Standard Completed for Internet Video Coding

A new standard for video coding suitable for the internet as well as other video applications, was completed at the 120th MPEG meeting. The Internet Video Coding (IVC) standard was developed with the intention of providing the industry with an “Option 1” video coding standard. In ISO/IEC language, this refers to a standard for which patent holders have declared a willingness to grant licenses free of charge to an unrestricted number of applicants for all necessary patents on a worldwide, non-discriminatory basis and under other reasonable terms and conditions, to enable others to make, use, and sell implementations of the standard. At the time of completion of the IVC standard, the specification contained no identified necessary patent rights except those available under Option 1 licensing terms. During the development of IVC, MPEG removed from the draft standard any necessary patent rights that it was informed were not available under such Option 1 terms, and MPEG is optimistic of the outlook for the new standard. MPEG encourages interested parties to provide information about any other similar cases. The IVC standard has roughly similar compression capability as the earlier AVC standard, which has become the most widely deployed video coding technology in the world. Tests have been conducted to verify IVC’s strong technical capability, and the new standard has also been shown to have relatively modest implementation complexity requirements.

Evidence of new Video Transcoding Technology using Side Streams

Following a “Call for Evidence” (CfE) issued by MPEG in July 2017, evidence was evaluated at the 120th MPEG meeting to investigate whether video transcoding technology has been developed for transcoding assisted by side data streams that is capable of significantly reducing the computational complexity without reducing compression efficiency. The evaluations of the four responses received included comparisons of the technology against adaptive bit-rate streaming using simulcast as well as against traditional transcoding using full video re-encoding. The responses span the compression efficiency space between simulcast and full transcoding, with trade-offs between the bit rate required for distribution within the network and the bit rate required for delivery to the user. All four responses provided a substantial computational complexity reduction compared to transcoding using full re-encoding. MPEG plans to further investigate transcoding technology and is soliciting expressions of interest from industry on the need for standardization of such assisted transcoding using side data streams.

MPEG currently works on two related topics which are referred to as network-distributed video coding (NDVC) and network-based media processing (NBMP). Both activities involve the network, which is more and more evolving to highly distributed compute and delivery platform as opposed to a bit pipe, which is supposed to deliver data as fast as possible from A to B. This phenomena could be also interesting when looking at developments around 5G, which is actually much more than just radio access technology. These activities are certainly worth to monitor as it basically contributes in order to make networked media resources accessible or even programmable. In this context, I would like to refer the interested reader to the December’17 theme of the IEEE Computer Society Computing Now, which is about Advancing Multimedia Content Distribution.

Publicly available documents from the 120th MPEG meeting can be found here (scroll down to the end of the page). The next MPEG meeting will be held in Gwangju, Korea, January 22-26, 2018. Feel free to contact Christian Timmerer for any questions or comments.

Some of the activities reported above are considered within the Call for Papers at 23rd Packet Video Workshop (PV 2018) co-located with ACM MMSys 2018 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Adaptive media streaming, and content storage, distribution and delivery
  • Network-distributed video coding and network-based media processing
  • Next-generation/future video coding, point cloud compression
  • Audiovisual communication, surveillance and healthcare systems
  • Wireless, mobile, IoT, and embedded systems for multimedia applications
  • Future media internetworking: information-centric networking and 5G
  • Immersive media: virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 360° video and multi-sensory systems, and its streaming
  • Machine learning in media coding and streaming systems
  • Standardization: DASH, MMT, CMAF, OMAF, MiAF, WebRTC, MSE, EME, WebVR, Hybrid Media, WAVE, etc.
    Applications: social media, game streaming, personal broadcast, healthcare, industry 4.0, education, transportation, etc.

Important dates

  • Submission deadline: March 1, 2018
  • Acceptance notification: April 9, 2018
  • Camera-ready deadline: April 19, 2018

JPEG Column: 77th JPEG Meeting in Macau, China

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JPEG XS is now entering the final phases of the standard definition and soon will be available. It is important to clarify the change on the typical JPEG approach, as this is the first JPEG image compression standard that is not developed only targeting the best compression performance for the best perceptual quality. Instead, JPEG XS establishes a compromise between compression efficiency and low complexity. This new approach is also complemented with the development of a new part for the well-established JPEG 2000, named High Throughput JPEG 2000.

With these initiatives, JPEG committee is standardizing low complexity and low latency codecs, with a slight sacrifice of the compression performance usually seek in previous standards. This change of paradigm is justified considering the current trends on multimedia technology with the continuous grow on devices that are usually highly dependent of battery life cycles, namely mobiles, tablets, and also augmented reality devices or autonomous robots. Furthermore this standard provides support for applications like Omnidirectional video capture or real time video storage and streaming applications. Nowadays, networks tend to grow in available bandwidth. The memory available in most devices has also been reaching impressive numbers. Although compression is still required to simplify the large amount of data manipulation, its performance might become secondary if kept into acceptable levels. As it is obvious, considering the advances in coding technology of the last 25 years, these new approaches define codecs with compression performances largely above the JPEG standard used in most devices today. Moreover, they provide enhanced capabilities like HDR support, lossless or near lossless modes, or alpha plane coding.

On the 77th JPEG meeting held in Macau, China, from 21st to 27th of October several activities have been considered, as shortly described in the following.

IMG_3037r025

  1. A call for proposals on JPEG 360 Metadata for the current JPEG family of standards has been issued.
  2. New advances on low complexity/low latency compression standards, namely JPEG XS and High Throughput JPEG 2000.
  3. Continuation of JPEG Pleno project that will lead to a family of standards on different 3D technologies, like light fields, digital holography and also point clouds data.
  4. New CfP for the Next-Generation Image Compression Standard.
  5. Definition of a JPEG reference software.

Moreover, a celebration of the 25th JPEG anniversary where early JPEG committee members from Asia have been awarded has taken place.

The different activities are described in the following paragraphs.

 

JPEG Privacy and Security

JPEG Privacy & Security is a work item (ISO/IEC 19566-4) aiming at developing a standard that provides technical solutions, which can ensure privacy, maintaining data integrity and protecting intellectual property rights (IPR). A Call for Proposals was published in April 2017 and based on descriptive analysis of submitted solutions for supporting protection and authenticity features in JPEG files, a working draft of JPEG Privacy & Security in the context of JPEG Systems standardization was produced during the 77th JPEG meeting in Macau, China. To collect further comments from the stakeholders in this filed, an open online meeting for JPEG Privacy & Security will be conducted before the 78th JPEG meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Jan. 27-Feb 2, 2018. JPEG Committee invites interested parties to the meeting. Details will be announced in the JPEG Privacy & Security AhG email reflector.

 

JPEG 360 Metadata

The JPEG Committee has issued a “Draft Call for Proposals (CfP) on JPEG 360 Metadata” at the 77th JPEG meeting in Macau, China. The JPEG Committee notes the increasing use of multi-sensor images from multiple image sensor devices, such as 360 degree capturing cameras or dual-camera smartphones available to consumers. Images from these cameras are shown on computers, smartphones and Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). JPEG standards are commonly used for image compression and file format to store and share such content. However, because existing JPEG standards do not fully cover all new uses, incompatibilities have reduced the interoperability of 360 images, and thus reduce the widespread ubiquity, which consumers have come to expect when using JPEG-based images. Additionally, new modalities for interaction with images, such as computer-based augmentation, face-tagging, and object classification, require support for metadata that was not part of the scope of the original JPEG. To avoid fragmentation in the market and to ensure interoperability, a standard way of interaction with multi-sensor images with richer metadata is desired in JPEG standards. This CfP invites all interested parties, including manufacturers, vendors and users of such devices to submit technology proposals for enabling interactions with multi-sensor images and metadata that fulfill the scope, objectives and requirements.

 

High Throughput JPEG 2000

The JPEG Committee is continuing its work towards the creation of a new Part 15 to the JPEG 2000 suite of standards, known as High Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K).

Since the release of an initial Call for Proposals (CfP) at the outcome of its 76th meeting, the JPEG Committee has completed the software test bench that will be used to evaluate technology submissions, and has reviewed initial registrations of intent. Final technology submissions are due on 1 March 2018.

The HTJ2K activity aims to develop an alternate block-coding algorithm that can be used in place of the existing block coding algorithm specified in ISO/IEC 15444-1 (JPEG 2000 Part 1). The objective is to significantly increase the throughput of JPEG 2000, at the expense of a small reduction in coding efficiency, while allowing mathematically lossless transcoding to and from codestreams using the existing block coding algorithm.

 

JPEG XS

This project aims at the standardization of a visually lossless low-latency lightweight compression scheme that can be used as a mezzanine codec for the broadcast industry, Pro-AV and other 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 four rounds of Core Experiments, the Core Coding System has now been finalized and the ballot process has been initiated.

Additional parts of the Standard are still being specified, in particular future profiles, as well as transport and container formats. The 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. Publication of the International Standard is expected for Q3 2018.

 

JPEG Pleno

This standardization effort is targeting the generation of a multimodal framework for the exchange of light field, point cloud, depth+texture and holographic data in end-to-end application chains. Currently, the JPEG Committee is defining the coding framework of the light field modality for which the signalling syntax will be specified in part 2 of the JPEG Pleno standard. In parallel, JPEG is reaching out to companies and research institutes that are active in the point cloud and holography arena and invites them to contribute to the standardization effort. JPEG is seeking for additional input both at the level of test data and quality assessment methodologies for this specific type of image modalities as technology that supports their generation, reconstruction and/or rendering.

 

JPEG XL

The JPEG Committee has launched a Next-Generation Image Compression Standardization activity, also referred to as JPEG XL. This activity aims to develop a standard for image compression that offers substantially better compression efficiency than existing image formats (e.g. >60% over JPEG-1), along with features desirable for web distribution and efficient compression of high-quality images.

The JPEG Committee intends to issue a final Call for Proposals (CfP) following its 78th meeting (January 2018), with the objective of seeking technologies that fulfill the objectives and scope of the Next-Generation Image Compression Standardization activity.

A draft Call for Proposals, with all related info, has been issued and can be found in JPEG website. Comments are welcome and should be submitted as specified in the document.

To stay posted on the action plan for JPEG XL, please regularly consult our website at jpeg.org and/or subscribe to our e-mail reflector. You will receive information to confirm your subscription, and upon the acceptance of the moderator will be included in the mailing-list.

 

JPEG Reference Software

Along with its celebration of the 25th anniversary of the commonly known JPEG still image compression specifications, The JPEG Committee has launched an activity to fill a long-known gap in this important image coding standard, namely the definition of a JPEG reference software. For its 77th meeting, The JPEG Committee collected submissions for a reference software that were evaluated for suitability, and started now the standardization process of such software on the basis of submissions received.


IMG_1670r050

JPEG 25th anniversary of the first JPEG standard

The JPEG Committee had a 25th anniversary celebration of its first standard in Macau specifically organized to honour past committee members from Asia, and was proud to award Takao Omachi for his contributions to the first JPEG standard, Fumitaka Ono for his long lasting contributions to JBIG and JPEG standards, and Daniel Lee for contributions to JPEG family of standards and long lasting services as Convenor of the JPEG Committee. The celebrations of the anniversary of this successful standard that is still growing in its use after 25th years will have a third and final event during the 79th JPEG meeting planned in La Jolla, CA, USA.

JPEG77annivers25

 

Final Quote

“JPEG is committed to design of specifications that ensure privacy and other security and protection solutions across the entire JPEG family of standards” 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, JPEG Systems and JPEG Pleno families of imaging standards.

The JPEG group meets nominally three times a year, in Europe, North America and Asia. The latest 75th    meeting was held on March 26-31, 2017, in Sydney, Australia. The next (76th) JPEG Meeting will be held on July 15-21, 2017, in Torino, Italy.

More information about JPEG and its work is available at www.jpeg.org or by contacting Antonio Pinheiro and Frederik Temmermans 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 78, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, January 27 to February 2, 2018
  • No 79, La Jolla (San Diego), CA, USA, April 9 to 15, 2018
  • No 80, Berlin, Germany, July 7 to 13, 2018

Awarding the Best Social Media Reporters

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The SIGMM Records team has adopted a new strategy to encourage the publication of information, and thus increase the chances to reach the community, increase knowledge and foster interaction. It consists of awarding the best Social Media reporters for each SIGMM conference, being the award a free registration to one of the SIGMM conference within a period of one year. All SIGMM members are welcome to participate and contribute, and are candidates to receive the award.

The Social Media Editors will issue a new open Call for Reports (CfR) via the Social Media channels every time a new SIGMM conference takes place, so the community can remember or be aware of this initiative, as well as can refresh its requirements and criteria.

The CfR will encourage activity on Social Media channels, posting information and contents related to the SIGMM conferences, with the proper hashtags (see our Recommendations). The reporters will be encouraged to mainly use Twitter, but other channels and innovative forms or trends of dissemination will be very welcome!

The Social Media Editors will be the jury for deciding the best reports (i.e., collection of posts) on Social Media channels, and thus will not qualify for this award. The awarded reporters will be additionally asked to provide a post-summary of the conference. The number of awards for each SIGMM conference is indicated in the table below. The awarded reporter will get a free registration to one of the SIGMM conferences (of his/her choice) within a period of one year.

Read more →

Posting about SIGMM on Social Media

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In Social Media, a common and effective mechanism to associate the publications about a specific thread, topic or event is to use hashtags. Therefore, the Social Media Editors believe in the convenience of recommending standards or basic rules for the creation and usage of the hashtags to be included in the publications related to the SIGMM conferences.

In this context, a common doubt is whether to include the ACM word and the year in the hashtags for conferences. Regarding the year, our recommendation is to not include it, as the date is available for the publications themselves and, this way, a single hashtag can be used to gather all the publications for all the editions of a specific SIGMM conference. Regarding the ACM word, our recommendation is to include it in the hashtag only if the conference acronym contains less than four letters (i.e., #acmmm, #acmtvx) and otherwise not (i.e., #mmsys, #icmr). Although consistency is important, not including ACM for MM (and for TVX) is clearly not a good identifier, and including it for MMSYS and ICMR results in a too long hashtag. Indeed, the #acmmmsys and #acmicmr hashtags have not been used before, contrarily to the wide use of #acmmm (and also of #acmtvx). Therefore, our recommendations for the usage and inclusion of hashtags can be summarized as:

Conference Hashtag

Include #ACM and #SIGMM?
MM #acmmm Yes
MMSYS #mmsys Yes
ICMR #icmr Yes

 

 

Report from MMM 2017

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MMM 2017 — 23rd International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling

MMM is a leading international conference for researchers and industry practitioners for sharing new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all MMM related areas. The 23rd edition of MMM took place on January 4-6 of 2017, on the modern campus of Reykjavik University. In this short report, we outline the major aspects of the conference, including: technical program; best paper session; video browser showdown; demonstrations; keynotes; special sessions; and social events. We end by acknowledging the contributions of the many excellent colleagues who helped us organize the conference. For more details, please refer to the MMM 2017 web site.

Technical Program

The MMM conference calls for research papers reporting original investigation results and demonstrations in all areas related to multimedia modeling technologies and applications. Special sessions were also held that focused on addressing new challenges for the multimedia community.

This year, 149 regular full paper submissions were received, of which 36 were accepted for oral presentation and 33 for poster presentation, for a 46% acceptance ratio. Overall, MMM received 198 submissions for all tracks, and accepted 107 for oral and poster presentation, for a total of 54% acceptance rate. For more details, please refer to the table below.

MMM2017 Submissions and Acceptance Rates

MMM2017 Submissions and Acceptance Rates

Best Paper Session

Four best paper candidates were selected for the best paper session, which was a plenary session at the start of the conference.

The best paper, by unanimous decision, was “On the Exploration of Convolutional Fusion Networks for Visual Recognition” by Yu Liu, Yanming Guo, and Michael S. Lew. In this paper, the authors propose an efficient multi-scale fusion architecture, called convolutional fusion networks (CFN), which can generate the side branches from multi-scale intermediate layers while consuming few parameters.

Phoebe Chen, Laurent Amsaleg and Shin’ichi Satoh (left) present the Best Paper Award to Yu Liu and Yanming Guo (right).

Phoebe Chen, Laurent Amsaleg and Shin’ichi Satoh (left) present the Best Paper Award to Yu Liu and Yanming Guo (right).

The best student paper, partially chosen due to the excellent presentation of the work, was “Cross-modal Recipe Retrieval: How to Cook This Dish?” by Jingjing Chen, Lei Pang, and Chong-Wah Ngo. In this work, the problem of sharing food pictures from the viewpoint of cross-modality analysis was explored. Given a large number of image and recipe pairs acquired from the Internet, a joint space is learnt to locally capture the ingredient correspondence from images and recipes.

Phoebe Chen, Laurent Amsaleg and Shin’ichi Satoh (left) present the Best Student Paper Award to Jingjing Chen and Chong-Wah Ngo (right).

Phoebe Chen, Shin’ichi Satoh and Laurent Amsaleg (left) present the Best Student Paper Award to Jingjing Chen and Chong-Wah Ngo (right).

The two runners-up were “Spatio-temporal VLAD Encoding for Human Action Recognition in Videos” by Ionut Cosmin Duta, Bogdan Ionescu, Kiyoharu Aizawa, and Nicu Sebe, and “A Framework of Privacy-Preserving Image Recognition for Image-Based Information Services” by Kojiro Fujii, Kazuaki Nakamura, Naoko Nitta, and Noboru Babaguchi.

Video Browser Showdown

The Video Browser Showdown (VBS) is an annual live video search competition, which has been organized as a special session at MMM conferences since 2012. In VBS, researchers evaluate and demonstrate the efficiency of their exploratory video retrieval tools on a shared data set in front of the audience. The participating teams start with a short presentation of their system and then perform several video retrieval tasks with a moderately large video collection (about 600 hours of video content). This year, seven teams registered for VBS, although one team could not compete for personal and technical reasons. For the first time in 2017, live judging was included, in which a panel of expert judges made decisions in real-time about the accuracy of the submissions for ⅓ of the tasks.

Teams and spectators in the Video Browser Showdown.

Teams and spectators in the Video Browser Showdown.

On the social side, two changes were also made from previous conferences. First, VBS was held in a plenary session, to avoid conflicts with other schedule items. Second, the conference reception was held at VBS, which meant that attendees had extra incentives to attend VBS, namely food and drink. And third, Alan Smeaton served as “color commentator” during the competition, interviewing the organizers and participants, and helping explain to the audience what was going on. All of these changes worked well, and contributed to a very well attended VBS session.

The winners of VBS 2017, after a very even and exciting competition, were Luca Rossetto, Ivan Giangreco, Claudiu Tanase, Heiko Schuldt, Stephane Dupont and Omar Seddati, with their IMOTION system.

The winners of VBS 2017, after a very even and exciting competition, were Luca Rossetto, Ivan Giangreco, Claudiu Tanase, Heiko Schuldt, Stephane Dupont and Omar Seddati, with their IMOTION system.

Demonstrations

Five demonstrations were presented at MMM. As in previous years, the best demonstration was selected using both a popular vote and a selection committee. And, as in previous years, both methods produced the same winner, which was: “DeepStyleCam: A Real-time Style Transfer App on iOS” by Ryosuke Tanno, Shin Matsuo, Wataru Shimoda, and Keiji Yanai.

The winners of the Best Demonstration competition hard at work presenting their system.

The winners of the Best Demonstration competition hard at work presenting their system.

Keynotes

The first keynote, held in the first session of the conference, was “Multimedia Analytics: From Data to Insight” by Marcel Worring, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He reported on a novel multimedia analytics model based on an extensive survey of over eight hundred papers. In the analytics model, the need for semantic navigation of the collection is emphasized and multimedia analytics tasks are placed on an exploration-search axis. Categorization is then proposed as a suitable umbrella task for realizing the exploration-search axis in the model. In the end, he considered the scalability of the model to collections of 100 million images, moving towards methods which truly support interactive insight gain in huge collections.

Björn Þór Jónsson introduces the first keynote speaker, Marcel Worring (right).

Björn Þór Jónsson introduces the first keynote speaker, Marcel Worring (right).

The second keynote, held in the last session of the conference, was “Creating Future Values in Information Access Research through NTCIR” by Noriko Kando, National Institute of Informatics, Japan. She reported on NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research), which is a series of evaluation workshops designed to enhance the research in information access technologies, such as information retrieval, question answering, and summarization using East-Asian languages, by providing infrastructures for research and evaluation. Prof Kando provided motivations for the participation in such benchmarking activities and she highlighted the range of scientific tasks and challenges that have been explored at NTCIR over the past twenty years. She ended with ideas for the future direction of NTCIR.

key2

Noriko Kando presents the second MMM keynote.

Special Sessions

During the conference, four special sessions were held. Special sessions are mini-venues, each focusing on one state-of-the-art research direction within the multimedia field. The sessions are proposed and chaired by international researchers, who also manage the review process, in coordination with the Program Committee Chairs. This year’s sessions were:
– “Social Media Retrieval and Recommendation” organized by Liqiang Nie, Yan Yan, and Benoit Huet;
– “Modeling Multimedia Behaviors” organized by Peng Wang, Frank Hopfgartner, and Liang Bai;
– “Multimedia Computing for Intelligent Life” organized by Zhineng Chen, Wei Zhang, Ting Yao, Kai-Lung Hua, and Wen-Huang Cheng; and
– “Multimedia and Multimodal Interaction for Health and Basic Care Applications” organized by Stefanos Vrochidis, Leo Wanner, Elisabeth André, Klaus Schoeffmann.

Social Events

This year, there were two main social events at MMM 2017: a welcome reception at the Video Browser Showdown, as discussed above, and the conference banquet. Optional tours then allowed participants to further enjoy their stay on the unique and beautiful island.

The conference banquet was held in two parts. First, we visited the exotic Blue Lagoon, which is widely recognised as one of the modern wonders of the world and one of the most popular tourist destinations in Iceland. MMM participants had the option of bathing for two hours in this extraordinary spa, and applying the healing silica mud to their skin, before heading back for the banquet in Reykjavík.

The banquet itself was then held at the Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre in downtown Reykjavík. Harpa is one of Reykjavik‘s most recent, yet greatest and most distinguished landmarks. It is a cultural and social centre in the heart of the city and features stunning views of the surrounding mountains and the North Atlantic Ocean.

Harpa, the venue of the conference banquet.

Harpa, the venue of the conference banquet.

During the banquet, Steering Committee Chair Phoebe Chen gave a historical overview of the MMM conferences and announced the venues for MMM 2018 (Bangkok, Thailand) and MMM 2019 (Thessaloniki, Greece), before awards for the best contributions were presented. Finally, participants were entertained by a small choir, and were even asked to participate in singing a traditional Icelandic folk song.

MMM 2018 will be held at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. See http://mmm2018.chula.ac.th/.

MMM 2018 will be held at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. See http://mmm2018.chula.ac.th/.

Acknowledgements

There are many people who deserve appreciation for their invaluable contributions to MMM 2017. First and foremost, we would like to thank our Program Committee Chairs, Laurent Amsaleg and Shin’ichi Satoh, who did excellent work in organizing the review process and helping us with the organization of the conference; indeed they are still hard at work with an MTAP special issue for selected papers from the conference. The Proceedings Chair, Gylfi Þór Guðmundsson, and Local Organization Chair, Marta Kristín Lárusdóttir, were also tirelessly involved in the conference organization and deserve much gratitude.

Other conference officers contributed to the organization and deserve thanks: Frank Hopfgartner and Esra Acar (demonstration chairs); Klaus Schöffmann, Werner Bailer and Jakub Lokoč (VBS Chairs); Yantao Zhang and Tao Mei (Sponsorship Chairs); all the Special Session Chairs listed above; the 150 strong Program Committee, who did an excellent job with the reviews; and the MMM Steering Committee, for entrusting us with the organization of MMM 2017.

Finally, we would like to thank our student volunteers (Atli Freyr Einarsson, Bjarni Kristján Leifsson, Björgvin Birkir Björgvinsson, Caroline Butschek, Freysteinn Alfreðsson, Hanna Ragnarsdóttir, Harpa Guðjónsdóttir), our hosts at Reykjavík University (in particular Arnar Egilsson, Aðalsteinn Hjálmarsson, Jón Ingi Hjálmarsson and Þórunn Hilda Jónasdóttir), the CP Reykjavik conference service, and all others who helped make the conference a success.