The 121st MPEG meeting concluded on January 26, 2018 in Gwangju, Korea with the following topics:
- Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis (CDVA) reaches Committee Draft level
- MPEG-G standards reach Committee Draft for metadata and APIs
- MPEG issues Calls for Visual Test Material for Immersive Applications
- Internet of Media Things (IoMT) reaches Committee Draft level
- MPEG finalizes its Media Orchestration (MORE) standard
The corresponding press release of the 121st MPEG meeting can be found here: http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/meetings/121
Overshadowing the meeting was a blog post by Leonardo Chiariglione published shortly after the 121st MPEG meeting, “a crisis, the causes and a solution”, which is related to HEVC licensing, Alliance for Open Media (AOM), and possible future options. The blog post certainly caused some reactions within the video community at large and I think this was also intended. Let’s hope it will galvanice the video industry — not to push the button — but to start addressing and resolving the issues. As pointed out in one of my other blog posts about what to care about in 2018, the upcoming MPEG meeting in April 2018 is certainly a place to be.
Here are detailed notes of the meeting followed with a brief summary of what else happened with regards to DASH, CMAF, OMAF as well as discuss future aspects of MPEG.
Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis (CDVA) reaches Committee Draft level
The Committee Draft (CD) for CDVA has been approved at the 121st MPEG meeting, which is 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 (ISO/IEC 15938-15).
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 specifies descriptors that fulfil these needs and includes (i) the components of the CDVA descriptor, (ii) its bitstream representation and (iii) the extraction process. The final standard is expected to be finished in early 2019.
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
In my previous blog post I introduced the MPEG-G standard for compression and transport technologies of genomic data. At the 121st MPEG meeting, metadata and APIs reached CD level. The former – metadata – provides relevant information associated to genomic data and the latter – APIs – allow for building interoperable applications capable of manipulating MPEG-G files. Additional standardization plans for MPEG-G include the CDs for reference software (ISO/IEC 23092-4) and conformance (ISO/IEC 23092-4), which are planned to be issued at the next 122nd 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
I have reported about the Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF) in my previous blog post. At the 121st MPEG meeting, MPEG was 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. Details about these calls can be found at https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/.
Internet of Media Things (IoMT) reaches Committee Draft level
The goal of IoMT is is to facilitate the large-scale deployment of distributed media systems with interoperable audio/visual data and metadata exchange. This standard specifies APIs providing media things (i.e., cameras/displays and microphones/loudspeakers, possibly capable of significant processing power) with the capability of being discovered, setting-up ad-hoc communication protocols, exposing usage conditions, and providing media and metadata as well as services processing them. IoMT APIs encompass a large variety of devices, not just connected cameras and displays but also sophisticated devices such as smart glasses, image/speech analyzers and gesture recognizers. IoMT enables the expression of the economic value of resources (media and metadata) and of associated processing in terms of digital tokens leveraged by the use of blockchain technologies.
MPEG finalizes its Media Orchestration (MORE) standard
MPEG “Media Orchestration” (MORE) standard reached Final Draft International Standard (FDIS), the final stage of development before being published by ISO/IEC. The scope of the Media Orchestration standard is as follows:
- It supports the automated combination of multiple media sources (i.e., cameras, microphones) into a coherent multimedia experience.
- It supports rendering multimedia experiences on multiple devices simultaneously, again giving a consistent and coherent experience.
- It contains tools for orchestration in time (synchronization) and space.
MPEG expects that the Media Orchestration standard to be especially useful in immersive media settings. This applies notably in social virtual reality (VR) applications, where people share a VR experience and are able to communicate about it. Media Orchestration is expected to allow synchronising the media experience for all users, and to give them a spatially consistent experience as it is important for a social VR user to be able to understand when other users are looking at them.
What else happened at the MPEG meeting?
DASH is fully in maintenance mode and we are still waiting for the 3rd edition which is supposed to be a consolidation of existing corrigenda and amendments. Currently only minor extensions are proposed and conformance/reference software is being updated. Similar things can be said for CMAF where we have one amendment and one corrigendum under development. Additionally, MPEG is working on CMAF conformance. OMAF has reached FDIS at the last meeting and MPEG is working on reference software and conformance also. It is expected that in the future we will see additional standards and/or technical reports defining/describing how to use CMAF and OMAF in DASH.
Regarding the future video codec, the call for proposals is out since the last meeting as announced in my previous blog post and responses are due for the next meeting. Thus, it is expected that the 122nd MPEG meeting will be the place to be in terms of MPEG’s future video codec.
