INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION FOR STANDARDISATION
ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE NORMALISATION
ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11
CODING OF MOVING PICTURES AND AUDIO

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 N11245

April 2010 – Dresden, DE

Source:

Convener of MPEG

Status:

Approved by WG11

Subject:

MPEG Press Release

Date:

23 April, 2010

 

Proposals for HEVC demonstrate substantial compression gains for video coding

Dresden, DE – The 92nd MPEG meeting was held in Dresden, Germany from the 19th to the 23rd of April 2010.

Highlights of the 92nd Meeting

Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding evaluates 27 proposals for HEVC

The Joint Call for Proposals on Video Compression Technology, which was issued jointly by MPEG and ITU-T VCEG in January 2010, had a very successful outcome. 27 complete proposal submissions were received, and the associated video material was evaluated in extensive subjective tests that were conducted prior to the 92nd meeting. More than 4000 video clips in all were subjectively evaluated at the three testing laboratories - FUB, EPFL and EBU. The testing laboratories conducted 134 test sessions involving 850 human test subjects, who filled out 6000 scoring sheets on which 300 000 quality scores were recorded for analysis. The technical evaluation of the proposals was performed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) during its first meeting, which was held under MPEG auspices in Dresden. The results clearly indicated that some proposals exhibited a substantial improvement in compression performance as compared to the corresponding AVC (ITU-T Rec. H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10) anchors. In a number of cases, the performance of the best proposals can be roughly characterized as exhibiting the compression capability to achieve similar quality using only half of the bit rate. The JCT-VC has begun identification and integration of proposed design elements toward development of a new video coding design to be known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). A report of the results of the subjective testing will be made available on 2010/05/14 as a public document N11275.

MPEG issues Call for Proposals for streaming MPEG media over HTTP

In recent years, the Internet has become an important channel for delivery of multimedia. As the HTTP protocol is a widely used Internet protocol, it has since been employed extensively for the delivery of multimedia content. However, there is no standard for HTTP based streaming or progressive download of MPEG media. Feedback provided by the industry highlighted the urgency for an international standard regarding the delivery of the MPEG content over HTTP. Consequently MPEG has decided to launch a separate and immediate standardization effort specifically addressing this need during its 92nd meeting in Dresden. A Call for Proposals, available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/hot_news.htm was issued at this meeting. Responses are due shortly before and will be evaluated at the 93rd MPEG meeting. The new standard is expected to achieve Final Draft International Standard status in July 2011.

MPEG-U for Rich Media User Interfaces is completed

At its 92nd meeting, MPEG has completed the development of MPEG Rich Media UI (MPEG-U), by promoting it to Final Draft International Standard ISO/IEC 23007-1. MPEG-U standardizes the packaging, delivery, representation and communication formats for widgets, fundamental building blocks for graphical user interfaces. This new MPEG standard adopts the W3C widget representation and extends it with the unique feature of inter-widget communication.  As a result, widgets based on W3C can be played on an MPEG-U player.  The standard provides a complete framework that is agnostic to the graphical representation format of the widget itself so that it can be used in a non-Web based environment without a browser. For example, non-MPEG standards for graphical representation such as W3C SVG can be used with this framework.

New BIFS Profile for enhanced Mobile Services is ready to be deployed

At this meeting, MPEG completed the standardization development of the new BInary Format for Scenes (BIFS) ExtendedCore2D profile – promoting the technology for final approval by issuing the specification as Final Draft Amendment 7 of ISO/IEC 14496-11. This profile will enable the development of more efficient and enhanced interactive services for mobile broadcasting services including digital radio or mobile television on small handheld devices. This profile also incorporates additional nodes and technologies specially designed for resource limited devices. Moreover, it is backward compatible with Core2D@Level1 which is widely adopted by the industry. Therefore applications that have already adopted the Core2D@Level1 profile can smoothly transition to the new profile.

Amendment to MPEG-7 Defines Robust Technology for Video Signatures

At its 92nd meeting, MPEG has completed a new amendment to MPEG-7 Visual (ISO/IEC 15938-3) to enable extremely fast searches of video sequences across large sets of video data by issuing the specification as Final Draft Amendment 4 of ISO/IEC 15938-3.  The new amendment defines a very compact description technology for Video Signatures, that has been shown to be robust to various modifications of the video data.  This new amendment is therefore exceptionally useful for finding similar and even modified versions of original video sequences.

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. The experts past and present have contributed a series of white-papers 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 there yet, it may appear there shortly – but you should also not hesitate to request it. You can start your MPEG adventure at: http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/technologies.htm.

Further Information

Future MPEG meetings are planned as follows:

For further information about MPEG, please contact:

Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione (Convener of MPEG, Italy)
Via Borgionera, 103
10040 Villar Dora (TO), Italy
Tel:  +39 011 935 04 61
leonardo@chiariglione.org

This press release and other MPEG-related information can be found on the MPEG homepage:

http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/

The text and details related to the Call mentioned above (together with other current Calls) are in the Hot News section, http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/hot_news.htm. These documents include information on how to respond to Calls.

The MPEG homepage also has links to other MPEG pages which 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 arianne.hinds@infoprint.com.