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 N7759

January 2006 – Bangkok, TH

 

Source:

Convenor of MPEG

Status:

Approved by WG11

Subject:

MPEG Press Release

Date:

January 27, 2006

 

MPEG completes two important tools

 

Bangkok, Thailand 2006 January 27 – The 75th MPEG meeting was held in Bangkok, Thailand from 2006 January 16-20.

 

MPEG-21 took another significant step forward with the completion of Part 15  Event Reporting. This new part of MPEG-21 is another important tool in suite of multimedia management technology. Event Reporting provides mechanisms by which providers may request peers to send reports on the usage of Digital Items. The standard provides a specification for the report requests and the reports themselves.  As for other MPEG-21 technologies, this infrastructure is not required in all MPEG-21 applications but is a vital business enabler for some content providers.

 

MPEG also completed Part 17 of MPEG-21 known as Fragment Identification of MPEG Resources. Fragment Identifiers for MPEG Media Types provides, for the first time, a complete set of location pointer mechanisms for the family of MPEG media. The Identifiers allow users to locate fragments of video, both spatially and temporally as well as identifying sections of their associated audio files. The standard also provides location mechanisms for 'logical models' of, for example, DVDs and CDs. The identifiers can be used across the Internet and not just within MPEG-21 as they are conformant with the W3C fragment identifier mechanisms.

 

In other MPEG News

 

MPEG continues to lead an exploration activity on 3D audiovisual (3DAV) coding. Recent focus has been on compression efficiency of multiview video coding. Prospective applications include Free-Viewpoint Television (FTV) and presentation of video on new types of 3D displays. Based on testing conducted on responses to the recent call for proposal up to 50% reduction of bit rate is achievable if views of the same scene are compressed jointly instead of using a conventional simulcast coding approach using state-of-the-art technology, namely, MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC). Based on these results MPEG will standardize multiview video coding technology as an extension of AVC.

 

MPEG has also embarked on the standardization of the use of video coding technology for the encoding of depth/disparity map information to enable simple support of video encoding for stereo video displays.  This will be Part 3 of the new "MPEG-C" (ISO/IEC 23002) video technology family.

 

The popular and pervasive AVC standard, also reached another milestone in Bangkok, when the amendment adding Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technology reached its first ballot stage (PDAM). During the next months, National Bodies and their MPEG experts will validate the standard and plan to advance it to the next ballot stage in July in Klagenfurt Austria.

 

MPEG completed to the work to maintain the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) technology in the marketplace. The existing DCT/IDCT accuracy requirements specifications have been replicated in the new Part 1 of MPEG-C (ISO/IEC 23002).

 

MPEG began working on two new areas of multimedia. The first is part of the Multimedia Applications Frameworks knows as MAFs. The Protected Music MAF is an example of how MPEG technologies can be used in specification of market ready devices.

 

 

Draft Call for Proposals on Reconfigurable Video Coding

MPEG has issued a Draft Call for Proposals on description languages and associated tools that enable decoder description configurations to be composed of a subset of tools from a video tools library. A Final Call for Proposals will be issued at the April meeting, while the evaluation of the answers to this Call for Proposals is foreseen for the July MPEG meeting.

 

As background information about this effort, MPEG continues to believe that it is important to propose innovations in the video coding field that are capable of satisfying the changing landscape and needs of video coding applications. With this objective in mind, MPEG intends to standardize a reconfigurable video coding framework allowing a dynamic development, implementation and adoption of standardized video coding solutions with features of higher flexibility and reusability. In this context, the objective of the MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) framework is to allow the definition of new video coding solutions out of an MPEG standard library of coding tools. Another objective of the MPEG RVC framework is the possibility to include new coding tools in the MPEG standard library.

 

Once again

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 begun to contribute a series of brief white-papers that explain each of these individually. The repository is growing week-by-week so if something you are interested is not there yet it will be shortly but do not hesitate to request it as well. You can start your MPEG adventure at: http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/mpeg-tech.htm

Further information

Future MPEG meetings are as follows:

-          Montreux, Switzerland 3-7 April 2006

-          Klagenfurt, Austria 17-21 July 2006

-          Hangzhou, China 23-27 October 2006

-          Marrakech, Morocco 15-19 January 2007

 

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

Email: mailto:leonardo@chiariglione.org

or

Peter Schirling
IBM Research – Digital Media Standards

River Road, MS 862H

Essex Junction, VT 05452, US
Tel +1 802 769 6123 Fax: +1 802 769 7362
Email: schirlin@us.ibm.com

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

http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg

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

The MPEG homepage also has links to other MPEG pages, which are maintained by some of the subgroups. It also contains links to public documents that are freely available for download to non-MPEG members.

Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email can contact Peter Schirling.