MPEG news: a report from the 85th meeting in Hannover, Germany

The 85th MPEG meeting was held in Hannover, Germany and a few topics discussed at this meeting I'd like to briefly review here.

Representation of Sensory Effects

A working draft of the MPEG Representation of Sensory Effects (RoSE) has been issued and I've given an overview at the Friday plenary. Interested readers might also have a look at the overview paper issued at the last meeting.

Multimedia Extensible Middleware

The Multimedia Extensible Middleware (MXM) also reached the working draft status after a very comprehensive contribution of more than 10 institutions has been submitted as a response to the CfP. It will provide an API for accessing various assets along the multimedia service delivery chain. I guess I'll provide a story soon about that...

Rich media user interface framework

media user interface framework is MPEG's approach getting closer to the actual user. At the moment four areas of interest have been defined: (1) a widget authoring format, (2) widget representation format, (3) widget/container interface, (4) widget/container server protocol. A context and objective document has been issued at this meeting and will appear soon on the MPEG Web site's exploration section.

MPEG-V

There has been quite some activity on MPEG-V, also related to RoSE. In fact, the system architecture of MPEG-V has been revised so that it maps onto the RoSE architecture. That is, now the RoSE architecture can be seen as a possible instantiation of the MPEG-V system architecture. Having said this, I think 'alea iacta est', RoSE will become part of MPEG-V. Of course, this is my personal opinion and please do not quote me on that ;-) Below you can find the architecture of MPEG-V and details will appear soon on the MPEG Web site's exploration section also.

Next Generation Video Coding

Industry is demanding for resolution, resolution, resolution beyond HD sometimes also known as Ultra High Defintion Video. Therefore, at the next meeting in Busan there will be a workshop prior (or after) the meeting where new ideas can be presented. However, for some reason it seems that we will already see a solution for that at this year's IBC which is based - now sit down - on MPEG-2.

Finally, this is the place where we had our social event - it was really very nice & thanks to the organizers of this meeting. Enjoy your holidays, you have deserved it.

Keynote@TEMU'08: MPEG-21 for Integrated E2E Management enabling QoS

At today's opening day of TEMU'08 I was pleased to give a keynote on "The MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework for Integrated Management of Environments enabling Quality of Service".
A summary is given below. Interestingly, a question from the auditorium was whether these description formats are somehow used by the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). The answer was no as there are currently no standardized means to transport MPEG metadata (this is true for both MPEG-7 and MPEG-21) using IETF-based protocols. However, there have been projects transporting these metadata formats, e.g., using HTTP, SDP(ng), RTP, etc., but this has not been recognized by the IETF so far or proponents of these implementations were not able to bring them to the appropriate working groups of IETF (for whatever reasons...).

Summary/Abstract of my talk [PDF]
The information revolution of the last decade has resulted in a phenomenal increase in the quantity of content (including multimedia content) available to an increasing number of different users with different preferences who access it through a plethora of devices and over heterogeneous networks. End devices range from mobile phones to high definition TVs, access networks can be as diverse as GSM and broadband networks, and the various backbone networks are different in bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) support. In addition, users have different content/presentation preferences and intend to consume the content at different locations, times, and under altering circumstances.

In order to become the vision as indicated above reality substantial research and standardization efforts have been undertaken which are collectively referred to as Universal Multimedia Access (UMA). An important and comprehensive standard in this field is the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework, formally referred to as ISO/IEC 21000. The aim of MPEG-21 is to enable transparent and augmented use of multimedia resources across a wide range of networks, devices, user preferences, and communities, notably for trading (of bits). In particular, it shall enable the transaction of Digital Items among Users. A Digital Item is defines as a structured digital object with a standard representation and metadata and is the fundamental unit of transaction and distribution within the MPEG-21 multimedia framework. A User (please note the upper case “U”) is defined as any entity that interacts within this framework or makes use of Digital Items. The MPEG-21 standard currently comprises 17 parts which can be clustered into six major categories each dealing with different aspect of the Digital Items: declaration (and identification), digital rights management, adaptation, processing, systems, and miscellaneous aspects (i.e., reference software, conformance, etc.). The talk will present and review these concepts with the emphasize on providing universal access to multimedia contents independent of the User's location, time, and other usage environment conditions.

Several projects funded by the European Commission (EC) – among them are DANAE and ENTHRONE (blog) worth to mention – have implemented and integrated (parts of) the MPEG-21 standard in order to demonstrate its feasibility. The aim of the DANAE Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) was to develop scalable coding formats and an MPEG-21-based end-to-end architecture comprising a server, client, and adaptation node (all MPEG-21-enabled) which allows for dynamic and distributed adaptation of scalable media formats. On the other hand, the objectives of the ENTHRONE Integrated Project (IP) are to provide an integrated management solution enabling QoS within heterogeneous environments based on MPEG-21 and to demonstrate the ENTHRONE solution in a large-scale pilot. Therefore, the talk will review ENTHRONE's contribution to the UMA issue and will demonstrate how the MPEG-21 concepts are adopted on a broader scale.

EIMS paper @ EUMOB'08 and panel discussion

At this year's EUMOB'08¹⁾ I've presented a paper entitled "An Integrated Management Supervisor for End-to-End Management of Heterogeneous Contents, Networks, and Terminals enabling Quality of Service" on behalf of the ENTHRONE consortium. This approach is based on open standards (mostly MPEG-7/-21) which provides a interoperable solution to the UMA problem.
Additionally, I participated in a panel session related to "Mobile media delivery: research trends and emerging applications" chaired by Catherine Lamy-Bergot (THALES Communications) where we discussed the following questions:

• Multimedia applications in future mobile Internet: what content for what applications?
• Perceived Quality of Service for multimedia content over bandwidth constraint and error prone channels: is an objective criterion realistic?
• Cross-layer optimization: a buzz or a real breakthrough?
• Mobile media delivery: the new grail for telecommunication operators?
• The insertion of digital right management (DRM) tools in mobile delivery: yet another brake to activity or a futile struggle against pirates?

It seems that cross-layer optimizations are a big issue for huge companies who have structured their organization according to the ISO/OSI layer, i.e., different groups working on transport, network, or MAC layer issues. Well, this would require that companies have to re-structure themselves but that's what they always do, so what's the problem? ;-) Anyway, in this context I've been pointed to the eMobility platform which introduces the concept of the Mediation Bus, a module/layer/whatsoever that is between the application and networking layers (from transport downwards) but also interacts with all the layers and also allows for backwards compatibility. Is this the first step towards a single communication layer (below the application layer)?

Finally, I learned from today's keynote that gaming (incl. virtual worlds) content overtook cinema/movie content and, thus, gaming content will become the dominating type of content of the future Internet. This is a trend also recognized by MPEG which started standardization efforts for enabling information exchange between virtual worlds but also between virtual worlds and the real world.

¹⁾ Two year's ago at the first edition of EUMOB a colleague of mine presented a paper on behalf of a previous project.

Interoperable SVC Streaming featuring MPEG-21 DIA at ICME'08 Demo Track

Abstract: In this paper we present an interoperable multimedia delivery framework for scalable video coding based on MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA). In can be used to transmit scalable video contents within heterogeneous usage environments where the properties of the usage environment (e.g., terminal/network capabilities) may change dynamically during the streaming session. The usage environment is signaled by interoperable description formats provided by the DIA standard. Additionally, the adaptation itself is done by exploiting the standard's generic adaptation approach, i.e., independent of the actual coding format. Thus, the overall framework is also applicable for other scalable coding formats.
Interestingly, the demo provides thanks to the optimizations of the reference software a superior performance compared to other SVC player implementations. A lot of people were impressed that the sequences were shown smoothly on a "casual" laptop without any delays or faulty pictures.

The 2-pager (demo description) is available here.