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MPEG Multimedia Standards Workshop

Purpose

Mutlimedia technologies have played an essential role in the deployment of many consumer and professional products and services around the world. Multimedia technologies have entered the common people’s life now. All indications show that, as in the past, they will continue to play an important role in the deployment of future products and services. This workshop will present some of the new multimedia technologies and their achievements and their applications, especially in audio, video standardizations and technologies as defined and studied by ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG11, ITU-T SG16 Q.6 and AVS Working Group of Ministry of Information Industry of China. Host & Date & Venue

Workshop on Multimedia New Technologies and Applications is hosted by Xidian University, Xi'an, China. Workshop will be held on Saturday 31 Oct. 2009 (a full-day meeting). Conference room is in Library of Xidian University. Open to all MPEG and JPEG members.

Organization Committee

Chairman Xin Wang University of Southern California, USA

Members Touradj Ebrahimi EPFL, Switzerland Wen Gao Peking University, China Tiejun Huang Peking University, China Joern Ostermann Leibniz Universtaet Hannover, Germany Guangming Shi XianDian University, China Huifang Sun MERL Technology Lab, USA Feng Wu Microsoft, China

Program (Final)

Time Topic Speaker Title 09:30 Welcome 09:40 Video Lu Yu 10:10 3DV Karsten Mueller 3D Video Formats and Coding Standards 10:40 MPEG-U JAEYEON SONG Widget Technologies in the Convergence Environment 11:10 Coffee break 11:20 RVC Euee S. Jang Introduction to MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding 11:50 Audio Minjie Xie MPEG Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) 12:20 BIF, LASeR YoungKwon Lim Rich Media standards in MPEG 12:50 Lunch 14:00 AVS Wen Gao 14:30 MPEG-7 Miroslaw Bober 15:00 MAF KyuHeon Kim 15:30 Coffee break 15:45 MPEG-21 Xin Wang MPEG-21: Multimedia Framework Standards 16:15 MPEG-V Sanghyun Joo Introduction to MPEG-V activities 16:45 MXM Christian Timmerer MPEG-M: MPEG Extensible Middleware - Accelerating Media Business Developments 17:15 Q&A Session Speakers, Audience 18:00 Adjourn

iTunesLP: The "first" (MPEG-21) Digital Item?

Apple recently released iTunesLP with which "the visual experience of the record album returns". Today, I've purchased the first iTunesLP (btw. 1st iTunes music thing ever!) to see what's behind this 'new format' and whether it can be considered as a digital item (as defined by MPEG-21). The album in question is "The Doors: 40th Anniversary Mixes" and comes with the regular media files which are placed in the regular iTunes directory structure. However, it also comes with a .itlp 'file' - at least this is what Mac OS X finder shows (cf. figure below).
However, what's behind is a simple directory structure comprising an index.html linking to a set of CSS files (css) and JavaScript files (controllers and src). Furthermore, the directory structure includes links to fonts, images, and videos required for the presentation of the LP and an Apple .plist file. The views directory provides something like the sub-pages from an album's booklet.
That is, the iTunesLP is basically a Web site (i.e., HTML+CSS+JavaScript) and iTunes becomes a ordinary Web browser? Hmm, finally I tried to transfer the iTunesLP to the iPhone but it seems that the iPhone cannot play the album in the same way iTunes does.

On the other hand, is it possible to realize the functionality provided by iTunesLP with MPEG-21 tools? I would say "Yes, it can"! In particular, the relationship between the various assets (text, images, videos, etc.) can be described using Digital Item Declaration and Digital Item Identification is used to identify the whole album and individual tracks. The interaction can be achieved by Digital Item Processing which enables the inclusion of ECMAScript (JavaScript) within a Digital Item. Finally, the File Format provides means to package the digital item into a single file - based on the ISO base media file format and compatible to .mp4 - enabling easy transaction among users within the whole value network.

So, is the iTunesLP a digital item? - Yes! Is the iTunesLP compatible with an MPEG-21 Digital Item - No (it is not compliant to MPEG-21) / Yes (it can be realized using MPEG-21). Additionally, MPEG-21 provides means to package a Digital Item into a single file and it is interoperable.

Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT): Ad-hoc Group Meeting in Milan, Sep 2009

Milan has not only the 'Duomo' (see picture below) but was also the host for the AhG meeting (Sep 10-11) on Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT), one of MPEGs newest exploration activity. The output is publicly available and provides the following documents:

• Actors in AIT payment/cashing protocols
• Context and Objectives for Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT)
• Requirements and candidate technologies for Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT)
• Terminology for Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT)

Please note that these documents have not been approved by MPEG yet. However, these documents form the basis for a Call for Proposals (CfP) hopefully issued during MPEG's next meeting in Xian.

MobiMedia & EUMOB 2009 Revisited

Last week I've been at MobiMedia and EUMOB 2009. The program started with a tutorial from Fernando Pereira about "Mobile Video Coding" starting from good old object-based coding introduced in MPEG-4. The concept of objects in video is there (i.e., production, etc.) but not yet in our house. He still believes in the concept of object-based video coding! In fact, flexible macroblock ordering (FMO) introduced in Advanced Video Coding (AVC) can be used to simulate object-based coding by grouping slices and prioritize them separately.

One keynote was given by Bernd Girod about Mobile Image Matching – Towards Mobile Augmented Reality. The concept is as follows: (1) Take photo on mobile device, (2) extract certain features, (3) transmit feature to server, (4) do processing on server (e.g., search for associated information about what is on the picture), and (5) send reply to device. This safes bandwidth as the picture does not have to be uploaded to the server, only the feature descriptor which is considerably smaller than the picture itself. And, it works - great ... overall interesting work and lot of people were involved in this project (>10).

Another keynote given by Chang Wen Chen was about "Mobile and Networked Video: A Challenging New Era". He introduced True Ubiquitous Video which is Mobile to Mobile that requires low complexity both at the encoder and decoder. Current coding schemes such as (Advanced Video Coding) AVC and Distributed Video Coding (DVC) require either high complexity at the encoder or decoder which fits well with the targeted application area. He proposes some kind of transcoding between DVC and AVC streams within the network. However, this is at a very early stage and it is not sure whether it leads to any success. Furthermore, he calls for semantic adaptation with more intelligence but I'm not sure what this exactly means ;-)

Finally, EUMOB had some nice presentations from various EC-funded projects such as FUTON, ADAMANTIUM, InterMedia, and OPTIMIX.

MMNS2009: Call for Participation - Venice Oct 26-27

MMNS 2009:
12th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on
Management of Multimedia and Mobile Networks and Services

http://www.manweek.org/2009/mmns

(part of MANWEEK 2009, October 26-30)
Telecom Italia Future Centre, Venice, Italy
***************************************************************************

Please note that early registration is possible till September 15.
After that registration costs increase with 50 Euro.
In addition, authors MUST register before September 15.
Registration is possible via the Manweek Web site: http://www.manweek.org/2009/
where you can find a list of possible hotels and travel information.

By continuing the long history of success of IFIP/IEEE MMNS,
the 12th edition of MMNS is expected to be even
more interesting, valuable, and fruitful for its participants.

The conference will be organized over two days (October 26 and 27),
associated with the other relevant events included in MANWEEK,
(Manweek Social event on Wed Oct 28) and
will bring together researchers from across the world to present and
discuss the latest in academic/industrial results,
also focused on the year's theme of managing wired-wireless multimedia
networks and services.

MMNS'09 is honored to host 2 excellent keynote speeches:
- jointly with MACE: Prof. Alva Couch (Tufts University)
- jointly with DSOM, MACE and NGNM: tba

In addition, the conference program will consist of 13 high-quality full
papers, selected after a very rigorous review process
(29.7% acceptance ratio), from 11 different countries.
These will be presented in 4 technical sessions, with comfortable space
for questions from the audience.

- Session A: "Multimedia Networks and Systems Management"
1) "Design of an Online Charging System to Support IMS-based Inter-
Domain Composite Services"
2) "Telecom Network and Service Management: An Operator Survey"
3) "On-Demand Multicast Streaming Using Collaborative Prefix Caching"

- Session B: "Multimedia Quality"
4) "Quality Adaptation Mechanisms for Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming"
5) "Modeling of a QoS Matching and Optimization Function for
Multimedia Services in the NGN"
6) "iBE: A Novel Bandwidth Estimation Algorithm for Multimedia
Services over IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks"
7) "A Cost Function for QoS-Aware Routing in Multi-tier Wireless
Multimedia Sensor Networks"

- Session C: "VoIP and Vocal Applications"
8) "QoE Assessment of VoIP in Next Generation Networks"
9) "NIDA: A Parametric Vocal Quality Assessment Algorithm over
Transient Connections"
10) "Voice2Web: Architecture for Managing Voice-Application Access to
Web Resources"

- Session D: "Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Networks"
11) "A Robust Algorithm for the Membership Management of Super-peer
Overlay"
12) "An Evaluation Criterion for Adaptive Neighbor Selection in
Heterogeneous Peer-to-Peer Networks"
13) "Improving Performance of ALM Systems with Bayesian Estimation of
Peers Dynamics"

The program will also include a Short Paper Session with 5 high-
quality papers,
presented together in a Poster Session
(handled jointly with MACE).
1) "Quality of Service for Multicasting in Content Addressable Networks"
2) "A General Architecture for Enabling and End User Services in IMS"
3) "Data Aggregation Scheme for a Multi-Application WSN"
4) "Context-aware IPTV"
5) "COOCHING: Cooperative Prefetching Strategy for P2P Video-on-Demand
System"

Additional information about the final technical program is available
at the conference Web site:
http://www.manweek.org/2009/mmns/mmns.php

MMNS'09 will be held at the fascinating Telecom Italia Future Centre,
in the worldwide known and magnificent Venice. The conference is
sponsored
by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
Working Group 6.6 on
Management of Networks and Distributed Systems, with technical co-
sponsorship by the
IEEE Communications Society and specifically the Technical Committee
on Network
Operations and Management (CNOM).