Amendment to "Most Wanted: MPEG-21 Industry Adoptions"

In my recent post I have forgotten to mention http://www.adactus.no/, a Norwegian start-up company, which provides MPEG-21-based solutions for "Personalized Mobile Experience". For their products they have adopted MPEG-21 DID, DIA, and DIP. For example, with their Mobilize Reporter one "can get the content captured on your mobile phone out on air in a couple of minutes". Another product is the Mobilize Live Feed for which a white paper is available.

Most Wanted: MPEG-21 Industry Adoptions

Since a while I am asking myself the same question over and over again. Is anybody using MPEG-21? Recently, I have written a critical review about MPEG-21 and with this post I would like to share some adoptions I am aware of:

• The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) forum adopted the concept of MPEG-21 Digital Items and defined DIDL-Lite as part of their ContentDirectory:2 Service Template. However, it is a derivation from a subset of the MPEG-21 DIDL. Within UPnP it is used as container format which has been enhanced with UPnP-specific data such as media resource attributes and Dublin Core metadata.
• The abstract Digital Item model has been adopted within Microsoft’s Interactive Media Manager (IMM) and implemented using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). It uses Dublin Core but also allows for the inclusion of domain-specific metadata (e.g., IPTC, EXIF, XMP, SMPTE, etc) or custom ontology predicates. Interestingly, IMM also adopts Part 3 of MPEG-21 – Digital Item Identification (DII) – which allows for uniquely identifying Digital Items and parts thereof. Unfortunately, Microsoft has discontinued the IMM solution.
  
• Several EC-funded projects (e.g., DANAE, AXMEDIS, ENTHRONE) have adopted a wide range of MPEG-21 technologies and provided reference applications on top if it.
• A rather uncommon adoption of MPEG-21 - since it is not in the 'core multimedia area' - is for the representation of complex digital objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital.Library. See here and here for details.
• The Digital Media Project (DMP) adopted a wide range of MPEG-21 technologies mainly focusing on digital rights management. See the digital media manifesto for background information about DMP.
  
• Of course, there are a wide range of 'MPEG internal' adoptions: MPEG-21 IPMP Components defines its own syntax enabling the declaration of protected Digital Items; some MPEG Multimedia Application Formats (MAFs) make use of Digital Items; the MPEG Extensible Middleware (MXM) defines an API to provide access to MPEG-21 technologies (among others).

... and this completes my (rather short) list. In case you think I have missed something or you are aware of any other adoption of MPEG-21 (or parts thereof), I would be glad if you could drop a note/comment --thanks in advance!

MPEG Global Conference points the way to Ultra HD online services

Source: http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/meetings/london09/london_press.htm

London meeting sees significant improvement in compression for High Performance Video Coding

London, United Kingdom – The 89th MPEG meeting was held in London, United Kingdom from the 29th of June to the 3rd of July 2009.

Highlights of the 89th Meeting

Responses for Evidence Evaluated for HVC
During its 89th meeting, MPEG evaluated responses that were received on the Call for Evidence on High-Performance Video Coding (HVC), issued to obtain evidence of video coding technology providing compression capability clearly higher than that provided by the existing AVC standard (ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10). Significant gains in compression were found when an assessment was made based on information brought by the contributors. A subjective comparison was performed in a blind test with a set of video test sequences encoded by the AVC High Profile at matching rate points. Gains were demonstrated for test cases ranging from resolutions as low as 412x240 pixels (Wide QVGA) up to resolutions for ultra-high definition. MPEG has therefore concluded that the development of the next generation of video compression technology is to be started with the issuing of a formal Call for Proposals by the next meeting.

AVC Extended with New Profiles for Baseline and MVC Technologies

At the 89th meeting, the AVC standard (ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10) was further extended with the issuing of a Final Draft Amendment (FDAM) ballot containing the specification of two new profiles and new supplemental enhancement information. The first of the new profiles is the Constrained Baseline Profile, which forms the maximally-interoperable set of coding tools from the most widely deployed of existing profiles (the Baseline and High Profiles). The second new profile is a special case of multivew video coding (MVC) called the Stereo High Profile. The Stereo High profile enables all of the coding tools of the High Profile along with inter-view prediction capability for two-view (stereo) video applications such as 3D entertainment video.

Additionally, a new supplemental enhancement information (SEI) message has been defined for AVC. This new message – called the frame packing arrangement SEI message – enables the encoder to indicate to the decoder how to extract two distinct views of a video scene from a single decoded frame. The message also serves as a way to support stereo-view video in applications that require full compatibility with prior decoder designs that are not capable of supporting the new Stereo High Profile.

MPEG Promotes Technologies to link Real and Virtual Worlds

At its 88th meeting, MPEG had published a new call for proposals (N10526) with updated requirements (N10235) for an extension of the Media Context and Control project.

The technical contributions related to haptic and tactile devices, emotions, and virtual goods received at its 89th meeting have enabled MPEG to build a complete framework for defining haptic properties on top of virtual objects and to control haptic devices. This is now part of ISO/IEC 23005 or MPEG-V, a standard (formerly called Information Exchange with Virtual Worlds) providing a global framework and associated data representations to enable the interoperability between different virtual worlds (e.g. a digital content provider of a virtual world, a game with the exchange of real currency, or a simulator) and between virtual worlds and the real world (sensors, actuators, robotics, travel, real estate, or other physical systems).

MPEG Progresses Media Context and Control Project

MPEG has also advanced to the Committee Draft stage four parts of MPEG-V. The first part describes the architecture of the standard. The second part, “Control Information”, provides metadata representation of device capabilities and user preferences to be used for the information exchange between a controlling device and the real actuator or sensors. The third part, “Sensory Information”, provides metadata to represent sensory effects such as temperature, wind, vibration, fog, and more. The fourth part, “Avatar Characteristics”, provides metadata to commonly represent information about Avatars for the exchange of virtual characters between virtual worlds.

MPEG Hosts MXM Developer’s Day

The first MXM Developer’s Day workshop has been hosted by MPEG during its 89th meeting. The workshop featured demonstrations by companies and organisations that are developing MXM standards and applications. MXM, currently at its Final Committee Draft stage, provides specifications of APIs and an open source implementation (released under the BSD licence) to access various MPEG standards for easy deployment of applications. In this workshop detailed information about the APIs currently under standardization has been provided and several interesting demonstrations with the potential to create new business opportunities have also been presented. More information about this workshop can be found at http://mxm.wg11.sc29.org.

Rich Media User Interface Moves toward Completion

At its 89th meeting, MPEG has also advanced MPEG Rich Media UI (ISO/IEC 23007 or MPEG-U), to the Committee Draft stage. MPEG-U standardizes widget packaging, delivery, representation and communication formats. In its current draft, MPEG-U adopts and extends the W3C widget representation to provide a complete framework that can be used also in a non-Web based environment without a browser. Additionally, this standard enables communication among widgets on the same device or different devices, and other applications to better support connected environments.

Visual Signatures Enable New Applications

MPEG’s Visual Signatures define the world’s first standardized tools for content-based identification of any visual content even in very large databases, e.g. on the web. These tools enable a range of new applications including semantic linking, library management, metadata association (e.g. title, photographer, director, etc.) and content usage tracking. In the same way that a fingerprint or signature identifies a person, a Visual Signature is a compact descriptor uniquely representing either an image or video. The descriptor is derived directly from analysis of the visual content and is robust to heavy compression and editing.

The Image Signature and Video Signature are two separate amendments to MPEG-7. Collectively the two amendments are referred to as the MPEG-7 Visual Signatures. At the London meeting, the Video Signature advanced to the Proposed Draft Amendment (PDAM) stage with a target completion date of July 2010. The Image Signature was published as an ISO/IEC standard in April 2009.

Mobile Services to Be Enhanced by New BIFS Profile
At this meeting, MPEG advanced the new BInary Format for Scenes (BIFS) profile to the Committee Draft stage by incorporating additional nodes and technologies submitted as responses to the Call for Proposals for new BIFS technologies. The requirements for this profile (provided in N10567) originated from organizations of various industries and SDOs for digital radio and mobile television broadcasting. This profile will enable the development of more efficient and enhanced interactive services for mobile broadcasting services including digital radio or mobile television on small handheld devices. Moreover, it is backward compatible with Core2D@Level1 which is widely adopted by the industry.

Contact MPEG

Digging Deeper Once Again
Communicating the large and sometimes complex array of technology that the MPEG Committee has developed is not a simple task. The experts past and present have contributed a series of white-papers that explain each of these standards individually. The repository is growing with each meeting, so if something you are interested is not there yet, it may appear there shortly – but you should also not hesitate to request it. You can start your MPEG adventure at: http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/mpeg-tech.htm

Ends

Further Information
Future MPEG meetings are planned as follows:
No. 90, Xian, CN, 26-30 October, 2009
No. 91, Kyoto, JP, 18-22 January, 2010
For further information about MPEG, please contact:
Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione (Convener of MPEG, Italy)
Via Borgionera, 103
10040 Villar Dora (TO), Italy
Tel: +39 011 935 04 61
Email: mailto:leonardo@chiariglione.org
or
Dr. Arianne T. Hinds
Ricoh | IBM InfoPrint Solutions Company
6300 Diagonal Highway, MS 04N
Boulder, CO 80301, USA
Tel +1 720 663 3565
Email: arianne.hinds@infoprint.com

This press release and other MPEG-related information can be found on the MPEG homepage:
http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg
The text and details related to the Calls mentioned above (together with other current Calls) are in the Hot News section, http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/hot_news.htm. These documents include information on how to respond to the Calls.
The MPEG homepage also has links to other MPEG pages which are maintained by the MPEG subgroups. It also contains links to public documents that are freely available for download by those who are not MPEG members. Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases by email should contact Dr. Arianne T. Hinds using the contact information provided above.

Future Internet: Special Issue "Metadata and Markup"

This special issue of the journal Future Internet seeks papers reporting high quality theoretical or practical work on Metadata and Markup. As data about data, metadata describes information about documents, events, locations or people but also addresses qualitative aspects, language, and include information about context or conditions of use. It may be used for naming, describing, cataloguing, and indication ownership of a resource. Metadata helps to facilitate the understanding and the management of data objects. While the metadata describes characteristics about the data, the markup identifies the specific type of data content and acts as a container for that document instance. Mark-up languages allow for the inclusion of many types of metadata ranging from simple dates or keywords up to highly-granular information such as Dublin Core or e-GMS.

We are looking for high-quality, original papers on any aspect of Metadata and Markup including topics such as standards for supporting knowledge markup, e.g., RDFa, microformats, GRDDL, multimedia annotation (e.g., by using MPEG-7), collaborative, shared tagging and annotation, semantic annotation in Semantic Wikis, semantic authoring and publishing, document engineering, deriving semantics from document structure and content, ontology-based authoring and markup, knowledge markup in the Semantic Web, using semantic annotations to define knowledge, integrated software architecture based on semantic annotation, annotation of software components, linguistic aspects of semantic annotations, text mining for creating knowledge markup, mining semantic information from blogs, forums or news sources, collaborative, shared tagging and annotation, evaluation of annotation frameworks, deriving formal semantics from (flat or hierarchical) tagging systems, vocabularies and ontologies for semantic authoring and annotation, tools for supporting knowledge markup, semantic annotation, sematic authoring, etc.

Andreas Dengel, Ph. D.
Guest Editor

Submission Information

All papers should be submitted to futureinternet@mdpi.org. To be published continuously until the deadline and papers will be listed together at the special issue website.

Submitted papers should not have been published nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All papers are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is a new international, peer-reviewed, quarterly open access journal published by Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI).

Open Access publication is free of charge in the first few issues to be published in 2009.

Keywords

• metadata and the web
• semantics, semantic web
• metadata capture and creation
• metadata lifecycle
• metadata schemes and ontologies
• defition of metadata

AhG on High-Performance Video Coding

A new interesting work item in the area of video coding is about to take off. The Ad-hoc Group (AhG) on High-performance Video Coding will discuss the following mandates:

1. To further discuss vision, applications and requirements of high-performance video coding.
2. To finalize the report on the Call for Evidence results N10721.
3. To discuss and refine the Draft Call for Proposals N10722, particularly with respect to communication coming from VCEG.
4. To organize the distribution of test sequences and anchors listed in the Draft CfP.
5. To actively seek for more test material according to N10362.

This activity will be chaired by Jens-Rainer Ohm, Vittorio Baroncini, and T.K. Tan and you may subscribe to its reflector via http://mailman.rwth-aachen.de/mailman/listinfo/mpeg-newvid.

Note that there will be an AhG meeting on Saturday and Sunday before the 90^th MPEG meeting.

Talk: Academic Career Paths - A Personal Perspective

The speaker is quite internationally experienced (having lived, studied, and worked in Munich, Ulm, Erlangen, Indiana, Colorado, Hawaii, and Australia).

Academic Career Paths - A Personal Perspective

Dr. Peter J. Schreier, Associate Professor

http://sigpromu.org/pejotes/

Monday, July 20, 4:00 pm

Lakeside Labs GmbH (B04b), presentation room

Please register at http://www.doodle.com/crcgvpvqcvqb59p2

QOMEX 2009: Workshop Update

Highlights from the Technical Program:

Plenary Talks

"Innovating the Multimedia Experience"
Speaker: Mr. Dave Blakely, Senior Director, IDEO

"Haptic Design Guidelines and Tools for the Next Generation of User
Experience"
Speaker: Dr. Christophe Ramstein, Chief Technology Officer, Immersion
Corporation

"Light is a Two-Way Street: The Next 50 Years of Video"
Speaker: Dr. Bruce Flinchbaugh, Texas Instruments Fellow and Director
of the Video & Image Processing Laboratory, TI, Dallas

"Comparison of Subjective Assessment Protocols for Digital Cinema
Applications"
Speaker: Prof. Christine Fernandez-Maloigne, Professor of Signal and
Image Processing in Poitiers University, France

More details about the talks:
http://www.qomex2009.org/PlenaryTalks.asp

Panel on "Quality of Experience: Tools, Targets and Trends"
Panel Chair: Prof. Fernando Pereira, Prof. ECE, Instituto Superior
Técnico, Portugal

Panelists:
Prof. Alan Bovik, Prof. and Chair, ECE, UT Austin
Dr. Gary Sulivan, Video Architect, Microsoft and Chairman, ITU/VCEG
Prof. Sebastian Moeller, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and Berlin
University of Technology
Dr. Stephen Winkler, Principal Technologist, Symmetricom

More details about the panel
http://www.qomex2009.org/PlenaryTalks.asp

To further enhance networking among participants, QoMEX 2009 has
created a number of social networks accessible from its website at http://www.qomex.org
. We would like to invite you to access them today, and get involved
in one or more of these social networks by introducing yourself,
presenting your interests, your ideas, results of your research in
various multimedia forms, giving your opinion and impressions,
exchanging all sorts of relevant information, asking questions,
providing answers, and in short, becoming an active members of the
growing community of Quality of Multimedia Experience. We look forward
to meeting you in our social networks even before seeing you in person
in San Diego.

Other updates on the website:
- Welcome Note from the co-chairs posted.
- Presentation preparation instructions, including the poster board
size have been added to the Paper Kit.
- The technical program schedule is now posted.

Presentations of the MMT Workshop

The presentations of the Modern Media Transport (MMT) workshop are publicly available and replicated here for your convenience.

Sam Narasimhan	Motorola	Use of MPEG-2 Transport in Broadcast and other applications – Challenges to be met by MMT
David Singer	Apple	Media Transport
Jaeyeon Song	Samsung Electronics	MMT
Alexander Adolf and Thomas Stockhammer	DVB	DVB experiences and related standards on using MPEG transport mechanisms
Thorsten Herfet, Manuel Gorius	Universität des Saarlandes	Predictable Loss and Predictable Delay for IP media services
Michael Eberhard, Christian Timmerer, Hermann Hellwagner	University of Klagenfurt	Fully Interoperable Streaming of Media Resources in Heterogeneous Environments
Ingo Kofler, Robert Kuschnig, Hermann Hellwagner	University of Klagenfurt	Media-Aware Network Elements on Legacy Devices
Doug Young Suh, Jin Woo Hong	Kyunghee University	Harmonization with the current QoS protocols for MMT

This activity is currently discussed within an Ad-hoc Group (AhG) with the following mandates:

1. Analyse current transport solutions for MPEG media
2. Collect use cases that benefit from a modern transport solution
3. Collect requirements for modern media transport
4. Define scope and goals for short terms and long term solutions

Email reflector is mmt@tnt.uni-hannover.de and in order to subscribe go to https://mailhost.tnt.uni-hannover.de/mailman/listinfo/mmt.

Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT)

MPEG is currently in an exploration phase for an "Advanced IPTV Terminal (AIT)" and will - for the first time - publish the following documents:

• N10858, Context and Objectives for AIT
• N10859, Use Cases for AIT
• N10860, Draft Requirements on Interfaces to Payment and Cashing Systems
• N10861, Context and Objectives for Interfaces to Payment and Cashing Systems

All these documents have an editing period of two weeks and will be available on the 17th of July at the latest. The documents will be made publicly available here but I will also blog about it.

We also have some requirements for AIT in general but this document needs a major revision and clean-up before it can be published. I expect this to happen during the next meeting in October 2009.

W3C Launches Device APIs and Policy Working Group

W3C launched a new Device APIs and Policy Working Group, co-Chaired by Robin Berjon (Vodafone) and Frederick Hirsch (Nokia). The group's mission is to create client-side APIs that enable the development of Web Applications and Web Widgets that interact with devices services such as Calendar, Contacts, and Camera. Additionally, the group will produce a framework for the expression of security policies that govern access to security-critical APIs (such as the APIs listed previously). Per its charter, this group will conduct its work in public. Learn more about the Device APIs and Policy Working Group.

Hmm, they could be interested in the MPEG Extensible Middleware (MXM) which also specifies API that might be exploited by the W3C Device API.

MPEG news: a report from the 89th meeting in London, UK

A lot of interesting things happened at this meeting, notably the MXM Developer's Day, the Modern Media Transport workshop, MPEG-V and MPEG-U have been promoted to committee draft, and for MPEG High-performance Video Coding (HVC) enough evidence has been provided in order to start working towards a Call for Proposals (CfP).

The MXM Developer's Day was a great success with 45+ participants and all presentations are publicly available. Leonardo presented the MXM Vision while Filippo and Marius concentrated on the MXM Architecture and API respectively. This introductory session was followed by practical examples and demonstrations:

• Fully Interoperable Streaming of Media Resources in Heterogeneous Environments
• Including MPEG-4 3D graphics in your application
• An MXM-based application for sharing protected content

The workshop on Modern Media Transport (MMT) had even more participants (80+) and was clustered into two session. Session one was focusing on industry practice and presentations where given on how MPEG-2 TS and MP4 is being used. Furthermore, the DVB activity in the area of IPTV and InternetTV was presented. All the presentations will be publicly available through the MPEG Web site. The conclusion was that although MPEG-2 TS / MP4 is heavily used, it has some drawbacks due to their popularity. That is, MPEG-2 TS is running out of code points which is an issue. On the other hand, if MPEG is going to standardize something new, it has been recognized that it has to be to substantially better than what exists on the market with a high demand of backwards-compatibility to MPEG-2 TS. The issue will be further studied and stay tuned!

MPEG-V also known as Media Context and Control has promoted four parts to committee draft. The four parts are as follows:

• Part 1: Architecture
• Part 2: Control Information
• Part 3: Sensory Information
• Part 4: Avatar Characteristics

I've provided an overview during the final plenary and the presentation is accessible here.

MPEG-U is about Widgets and has been promoted to committee draft also. It seems to be an interesting activity which has a relationship to W3C's Widget activity. It will be interesting to see how these two standards co-exist.

Finally, the call for evidence for High-performance Video Coding (HVC) provided the following result: "Yes, we have enough evidence about improved compression technology (compared to AVC HP)". Thus, MPEG started working towards a call for proposals and a time schedule has been created. Furthermore, the future collaboration between MPEG and VCEG has been discussed.

That's it for now but I'll provide more details on the individual topics later. Please stay tuned!