ISO-IEC/JTC1/SC29/WG11N1355
MPEG96
Sep-Oct 1996 / Chicago
| Source: | Convener of mpeg (iso-iec/jtc1/sc29/wg11) |
| Status: | Approved by WG11 |
| Subject: | mpeg Press Release |
| Date: | 2 October 1996 |
Emmy awarded for the
development of MPEG standards
[The following is quoted from the press notice released by the
American National Standards Institute, ANSI]
NEW YORK, October 2, 1996--The National
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) awarded its
1995-1996 Engineering Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in
Technological Development to the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical
Commission (IEC) for their standardization work in media, the
American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the U.S. member
body of ISO announced today.
The award was presented to a joint ISO/IEC
international subcommittee that developed standards (MPEG-1,
MPEG-2, and JPEG) related to coded representation of video and
systems for digital compression and coding of continuous tone
still images. MPEG compression technology is a cost-effective
means of delivering high quality audio and video programming to
consumers by reducing the bandwidth necessary to carry the signal
to homes and businesses across the globe. JPEG has revolutionized
still image technology for both consumers and commercial
interests with cost effective high quality still pictures.
Hundreds of dedicated individuals from 26
countries worked to develop each of these standards, and this
award represents an excellent achievement by the international
community, said Dr. Daniel T. Lee of Hewlett-Packard Company and
leader of the working group, responsible for developing the JPEG
standard.
The standards being recognized are: MPEG 1
(ISO/IEC 11172, Coding of moving pictures and associated audio
for digital storage media at up to about 1,5 Mbit/s); MPEG-2
(ISO/IEC 13818, Generic coding of moving pictures and associated
audio information); and JPEG (ISO/IEC 10918, Digital compression
and coding of continuous-tone still images). The standards were
developed by a subcommittee (Coding of audio, picture,
multimedia, and hypermedia information) of the ISO/IEC Joint
Technical Committee 1 on information technology. JTC-1 is
administered by ANSI on behalf of the United States.
The Emmy Award was presented October 1 at a
ceremony held in New York City. Accepting the award on behalf of
the ISO/IEC Subcommittee were: Dr. Hiroshi Yasuda, Chairman of
Subcommittee 29, Japan; Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, Convener,
Subcommittee 29, Working Group 11, Italy; Dr. Daniel Lee,
Convener, Subcommittee 29, Working Group 1, United States; and
Ms. Narumi Hirose, Secretariat, Subcommittee 29, Japan.
[End Quote ANSI press release]
Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, Convener of MPEG, said: "The
Emmy Award received 1st October by MPEG for its achievements in
video compression is a much deserved, if partial, recognition of
the importance of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards. The hundreds
and hundreds of experts who, over the years, have produced these
epoch-making pieces of technology, have created an unrivaled
model of technical cooperation for everybody working in
IT-standardization".
The Emmy award was presented at the same time that MPEG held
its 36th meeting in Chicago, Illinois (USA). The meeting took
place from 30 September - 2 October 1996, and was hosted by the
United States National Standards Body (USNB) and organized by
Motorola.
MPEG has taken on board a new Work Item, called 'Audiovisual
Content Description Interface'. The idea is to add, to the coded
representation of audiovisual objects, information about texture,
shape, color (video), frequency range (audio), and also higher
level semantic information, such as 'beach', or 'flute', or 'male
voice', or 'car', 'blue'. With this information, audiovisual
information can be found and retrieved in a standardized way.
Finding information, e.g. on the WWW, is getting increasingly
important. Currently, only text-based content can be well indexed
and searched for; there is an obvious need to for the same
possibilities for audiovisual content. The preliminary workplan
indicates the standard will be ready in 1999. This new standard
will be called MPEG-7.
Details on the 36th MPEG meeting
A detailed list of the results of the 36th meeting follows
below. The list is largely organized according to the several sub
groups of MPEG.
Requirements
The re-instated requirements group has begun an assessment of what is needed in the MPEG-4 standard for the support of 'multimedia database storage and retrieval'. A profile is being drafted for these applications, that need scalable coding, searching for specific objects in a scene, and browsing through - having access to - these individual objects. MPEG members from the audiovisual industry will bring further requirements for this profile to MPEG. Because many people still think that MPEG-4 is about 'low bitrates', it is very important to note that this profile will require MPEG4's new capabilities while coding at a high quality - and therefore high bitrates. Currently, there is one other profile defined, for real-time audio-visual communication. It is expected that more profiles will be defined in the near future.
Systems
The systems group focused on the preparation of the Working
Draft, to be ready in November. A first verification model based
on the current specification has been written. It allows basic
MPEG-4 functionalities such as composition and content based
interaction.
The architecture developed by Systems was adopted for the
integration of natural and synthetic material, but the inclusion
of synthetic material, notably 3D objects, poses new requirements
that need further study. The final system architecture should
include comparable functions achieved by existing systems such as
VRML 2.0. Another difficult topic is developing a signaling
systems that can be used in interactive, conversational and
broadcast services. The systems group looks at what was done in
MPEG-2 (the so-called DSM-CC, Digital Storage Media - Command
& Control), and also the signaling used by the new ITU-T
standard for low bitrate videotelephony, H.245.
Integration of synthetic audio and video material
A verification model has been drafted for body and face animation, allowing the seamless integration of 'animated people' in natural scenes. As also text-to-speech systems are addressed, and the interface to the synthetic head is specified, these artificial people will be able to generate speech from written text. Currently, the text-to-speech is limited to languages from the Far East: Japanese and Korean. Other languages will follow. The standardization only addresses the interface to these text-to-speech systems, not the systems themselves.
Other items for standardization that are in the verification
model are text and graphics overlays, as these are very useful
visual objects in multimedia applications.
Audio
The audio group produced a preliminary version of the Working
Draft for MPEG-4 Audio, containing detailed technical
descriptions of all the tools comprising the VM-2.0. Currently,
the VM supports the following functionalities: compression, pitch
scaling and time scaling. The compression functionality is
flexible in terms of bandwidth, bit-rate and complexity.
Video
In the MPEG-4 video group, numerous technical contributions
have been reviewed, and the most promising proposals have been
accepted as a part of the standard. These new elements of the
MPEG-4 standard improve considerably the compression efficiency
in intra frames. Also, the resilience against transmission errors
is drastically improved with the introduction of
resynchronization words. In cooperation with the implementation
study group, the computational complexity of encoding and
decoding video objects with an arbitrary shape has been reduced
significantly.
For the coming weeks, over 20 so-called 'core experiments'
have been planned. In the MPEG-meeting of November in Brazil, a
number of promising core experiments are expected to again
improve the standard considerably. Notably, the coding of the
shape of objects will be changed, to obtain a much more efficient
scheme. That meeting will also fix the first Working Draft of
MPEG-4 Video, giving the first draft of the final standard.
The extension of the MPEG-2 video standard for multi-view
applications (e.g. used for stereoscopic video) has been promoted
to a final International Standard. It foresees higher compression
of the right view of stereoscopic video by exploiting the
similarity between the left and the right view.
Test activities
In the last two years the test group has coordinated several
testing activities aimed at verifying the performance of the
MPEG-2 video coding standard at different profiles and levels. At
this meeting the results of tests carried out on stereoscopic
sequences coded with the MPEG-2 multiview profile (ISO/IEC
13818-2/AM3) were presented and discussed.
These tests were carried out at three different test sites
located in Japan, Germany and Canada. The results of the
different test sites are consistent with each other and show that
in general, at the tested bitrates, the observers judged that the
MPEG-2 multiview profile coding scheme did not introduce annoying
coding artifacts.
Next to addressing MPEG-2 issues, the test subgroup has
continued the work to define test methods and procedures for the
July '97 MPEG-4 tests. These tests will be aimed at checking the
status of the Verification Models of Audio and Video against the
requirements for the standard, and against technology available
in the market place, as well as newly emerging technology.
The verification tests mentioned above are meant to check the
performance of specific implementations of the complete standard
(including the coding of natural and synthetic audio and video
and the systems layer) This is a challenging goal, that requires,
in a very early stage, the availability of fast software decoders
or even an MPEG4 system implemented in hardware.
Implementation Studies
Using a performance orientated implementation of the video
verification model (VM) produced by members of the implementation
studies group, a tenfold increase in performance has been
achieved against the existing software implementations of the VM.
Detailed profiling of this software identified the key
performance critical components of the standard. Based upon this
information, the video and implementation studies groups have
jointly started an activity to reduce the complexity of the
identified modules. There is still considerable scope to further
improve the performance of the software and then in the future to
include platform-dependent optimizations.
Another key activity performed by the implementation studies
group was the identification of ways to gracefully degrade the
computational complexity under conditions of high processing
demands from either MPEG-4 itself or other co-existent
applications, for instance when the decoder runs in software on a
personal computer. These techniques, if proven feasible, will
lead to increased service availability to the user.
Background
Over 300 experts took part in the work in Chicago, working in
several sub groups on specific issues. The next meeting will take
place from 18 through 22 November in Maceiņ, Brazil, hosted by
ABNT (the Brazilian national standards body).
For further information, please contact:
Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, (Convenor of MPEG)
CSELT
Via G. Reiss Romoli, 274
10148 Torino, ITALY
Tel.: +39 11 228 6120; Fax: +39 11 228 6299
Email: leonardo.chiariglione@cselt.it
or refer to the MPEG homepage:
http://www.cselt.it/mpeg
and to other pages containing information on MPEG-4 elements:
http://www-elec.enst.fr/msdl
http://www.es.com/mpeg4-snhc