Terms of Reference

1. Title
Coding of Moving Pictures and Audio

2. Area of work
Development of international standards for compression, decompression, processing, and coded representation of moving pictures, audio, and their combination, in order to satisfy a wide variety of applications.

3. Programme of work

• Serve as responsible body within ISO/IEC for recommending a set of standards consistent with the Area of Work;
• Cooperate with other standardisation bodies dealing with similar applications;
• Consider requirements for interworking with other applications such as telecommunications and broadcasting, with other image coding algorithms defined by other SC29 working groups and with other picture and audio coding algorithms defined by other standardisation bodies;
• Define methods for the subjective assessment of quality of audio, moving pictures and their combination for the purpose of the area of work;
• Assess characteristics of implementation technologies realising coding algorithms of audio, moving picture and their combination;
• Assess characteristics of digital storage and other delivery media target of the standards developed by WG11;
• Develop standards of coding of moving pictures, audio and their combination taking into account quality of coded media, effective implementation and constraints from delivery media;
• Propose standards for the coded representation of moving picture information;
• Propose standards for the coded representation of audio information;
• Propose standards for the coded representation of information consisting of moving pictures and audio in combination;
• Propose standards for protocols associated to coded representation of moving pictures, audio and their combination

4. List of work items

5. Projects

6. Secretariat
UNINFO (Italy)

7. Structure

8. Terms of Reference of Experts Groups
8.1 MPEG-Requirements

Name: Requirements

Title
Requirements studies for MPEG standards.

Area of work
Studies with the purpose of making sure that requirements coming from the prospective applications and application areas of the generic coding algorithms developed by WG11 are taken in due consideration in all phases of the work.

Programme of work

• Collect and organise requirements, generic as well as specifically coming from the different application fields
• Identify the need of technologies not currently being considered by WG11 subgroups
• Produce a requirement definition document prior to algorithm selection phase
• Constantly update requirements definitions following arising needs coming from application areas
• Monitor the conformance of the algorithms under development with the requirements
• Develop profiling solutions to address relevant classes of applications for MPEG standard
• Assist in the development of MPEG standards
• Liaise with other standard bodies in the field of requirements

8.2 MPEG-Systems

Name: Systems

Title
Coding and delivery of Combined Coded Audio, Moving Picture and Related Information and Specification of Schemes for Declaring and Describing Digital Items, Multimedia Content Data Structures and Related Information (Metadata)

Area of Work

Development of international standards for the coding of the combination of individually coded audio, moving images and related information so that the combination can be used by any application. Development of  interface between the application and the delivery resources. Definition of the carriage of MPEG content on specific delivery mechanisms jointly with the respective standards bodies. Development of international standards for schemes that declare and describe digital items, multimedia content data structures and related information.  Description schemes shall enable creation, exchange, distribution, transaction, storage, search, retrieval, browsing and filtering of digital items and multimedia content.

Development of international standards for schemes that declare and describe digital items, multimedia content data structures and related information.  Description schemes shall enable creation, exchange, distribution, transaction, storage, search, retrieval, browsing and filtering of digital items and multimedia content.

Programme of work:

• Serve as responsible body within ISO/IEC for recommending a set of standards consistent with the area of work;
• Cooperate with other standardisation bodies dealing with similar applications;
• Consider requirements for interworking with other coding schemes, digital items, multimedia description schemes or content description structures defined by other standardisation bodies;
• Analyse system capabilities of audio and visual algorithms;
• Define operations on the coded audio/video bitstream to be supported;
• Specify generic coding schemes for combining audio, visual and related information;
• Propose standards for the coded representation of information consisting of moving pictures and audio in combination as well as for the representation of digital items, multimedia content descriptions and structures related to visual, audio, textual, and other data in combination;
• Develop and test efficient algorithms for the creation of multimedia description schemes;
• Analyse limitations and capabilities for significant physical delivery media and check for consistency of implementation;
• Define a common interface to access MPEG content irrespective of the source site being a remote interactive terminal on a network, or file system;
• Define relevant input digital items, multimedia material and relevant output presentations;
• Map this interface to the specific delivery mechanism jointly with the respective standards bodies;
• Test and validate the effective, efficient and extensible operation of multimedia description schemes;
• Verify the overall end-to-end operation e.g., with walkthroughs to ensure consistency of the interface.

8.4 MPEG-Video

Name: Video

Title
Coding of moving image information, evaluation of coding systems and content description schemes related to visual information, complexity and implementation feasibility analysis for visual information coding systems and content description schemes.

Area of Work
Development of international standards for coded representation of moving pictures, visual information and associated metadata. The evaluation of coding techniques and description schemes is performed based on their performance (both objectively and by formal subjective testing), efficiency with respect to software implementation, VLSI (programmable & dedicated) implementation and feasibility of systems architectures.

Programme of Work

• Serve as responsible body within ISO/IEC for recommending a set of standards consistent with the area of work;
• Cooperate with other standardisation bodies dealing with similar applications;
• Consider requirements for interworking with other moving picture coding algorithms defined by other working groups of SC 29 and other standardisation bodies;
• Define relevant input image material and output image devices;
• Develop and test efficient coding-decoding algorithms;
• Propose standards for the coded representation of moving image information and associated metadata.
• Develop methods for the subjective assessment of moving pictures bearing in mind the related activities of other standards making bodies, and cooperating with them
• Define and produce test source material;
• Organize subjective assessment tests for the quality of moving pictures
• Establish performance analysis criteria
• Carry out performance analysis by core experimentation procedures
• Establish complexity analysis criteria.
• Perform complexity analysis for representative sets of tools and algorithms.
• Solicit inputs from and engage in liaison with external bodies :-
• Perform explorations w.r.t. new technology trend areas within the scope of work

8.5 MPEG-Audio

Name: Audio

Title
Coding of Audio Information

Area of Work
Development of international standards for coded representation of audio information.

Programme of Work

• Serve as responsible body within ISO/IEC for recommending a set of standards consistent with the area of work;
• Cooperate with other standardisation bodies dealing with similar applications;
• Consider requirements for interworking with other audio coding algorithms defined by other standardisation bodies;
• Develop and test efficient coding-decoding algorithms;
• Propose standards for the coded representation of audio information.

8.6 MPEG-3DGC

Name: 3D Graphics Coding

Title

Coding of synthetic audio and video information for integration with natural audio and video information

Area of work

• Definition of a framework for Synthetic and Natural Hybrid Coding
• Development of standards for Synthetic and Natural Hybrid Coding

Programme of work

• Liaise with other standard bodies and working groups in relevant fields, such as synthetic information coding.
• Contribute to the definition of test and evaluation procedures.

8.10 Joint Video Team (JVT, Joint with ITU-T)

See N4400