MPEG 121 - Gwangju

Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis (CDVA) reaches Committee Draft level

Gwangju, Korea – The 121^st MPEG meeting was held in Gwangju, Korea, from 22 – 26 January 2018

Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis (CDVA) reaches Committee Draft level

At its 121^st meeting, MPEG promoted CDVA (ISO/IEC 15938-15) to Committee Draft (CD) level – the first formal step of the ISO/IEC approval process for a new standard. This will become a new part of MPEG-7 to support video search and retrieval applications.

Managing and organizing the quickly increasing volume of video content is a challenge for many industry sectors, such as media and entertainment or surveillance. One example task is scalable instance search, i.e. finding content containing a specific object instance or location in a very large video database. This requires video descriptors which can be efficiently extracted, stored and matched. Standardization enables extracting interoperable descriptors on different devices and using software from different providers, so that only the compact descriptors instead of the much larger source videos can be exchanged for matching or querying. The CDVA standard will specify descriptors that fulfil these needs.

The specification includes the components of the CDVA descriptor, its bitstream representation and the extraction process. The standard will be complemented by conformance guidelines and reference software (ISO/IEC 15938-16). The final standard is expected to be finished in early 2019.

CDVA contains components that are compatible with CDVS (Compact Descriptors for Visual Search, ISO/IEC 15938-13), a standard for images with comparable functionalities, but also uses predictive coding over video segments (e.g., shots). Additionally, CDVA introduces a new descriptor based on features which are output from a Deep Neural Network (DNN). CDVA is robust against viewpoint changes and moderate transformations of the video (e.g., re-encoding, overlays), it supports partial matching and temporal localization of the matching content. The CDVA descriptor has a typical size of 2–4 KBytes per second of video. For typical test cases, it has been demonstrated to reach a correct matching rate of 88% (at 1% false matching rate).

MPEG-G standards reach Committee Draft for metadata and APIs

The availability of high-throughput deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing technologies opens up 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 centres 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 DNA sequence 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 not only new compression and transport technologies, but also a standard specification for associating relevant information in the form of metadata and APIs for building interoperable applications capable of manipulating MPEG-G files.

The different parts of the MPEG-G standard are the results of the synthesis of technologies collected in response to a Call for Proposals issued at MPEG’s 115^th meeting in collaboration with the working group for standardization of data processing and integration of the ISO Technical Committee for biotechnology standards (ISO TC 276/WG 5).

At its 121^st meeting, MPEG promoted its second set of specifications of the family of MPEG-G standards to Committee Draft (CD) level. Such part of the standard provides a new compression technology (ISO/IEC 23092-3) for associating relevant information to the genomic sequencing data and a set of APIs supporting rich functionality for the access and manipulation of genomic data by interoperable applications. Additional standardization plans for MPEG-G include the Committee Drafts for reference software (ISO/IEC 23092-4) and conformance (ISO/IEC 23092-4), which are planned to be issued at the next 122^nd MPEG meeting with the objective of producing Draft International Standards (DIS) at the end of 2018.

MPEG issues Calls for Visual Test Material for Immersive Applications

After achieving the final stage of development for its Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF) at its 120^th meeting, MPEG is working on extending OMAF functionalities to allow the modification of viewing positions, e.g. in case of head movements when using a head-mounted display, or for use with other forms of interactive navigation. Unlike OMAF which only provides 3 degrees of freedom (3DoF) for the user to view the content from a perspective looking outwards from the original camera position, the anticipated extension will also support motion parallax within some limited range which is referred to as 3DoF+. In the future with further enhanced technologies, a full 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) will be achieved with changes of viewing position over a much larger range. To develop technology in these domains, MPEG has issued two Calls for Test Material in the areas of 3DoF+ and 6DoF, asking owners of image and video material to provide such content for use in developing and testing candidate technologies for standardization.