The original blog post can be found at the Bitmovin Techblog and has been modified/updated here to focus on and highlight research aspects. Additionally, this version of the blog post will be also posted at ACM SIGMM Records.
The 129th MPEG meeting concluded on January 17, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium with the following topics:
- Coded representation of immersive media – WG11 promotes Network-Based Media Processing (NBMP) to the final stage
- Coded representation of immersive media – Publication of the Technical Report on Architectures for Immersive Media
- Genomic information representation – WG11 receives answers to the joint call for proposals on genomic annotations in conjunction with ISO TC 276/WG 5
- Open font format – WG11 promotes Amendment of Open Font Format to the final stage
- High efficiency coding and media delivery in heterogeneous environments – WG11 progresses Baseline Profile for MPEG-H 3D Audio
- Multimedia content description interface – Conformance and Reference Software for Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis promoted to the final stage
Additional Important Activities at the 129th WG 11 (MPEG) meeting
The 129th WG 11 (MPEG) meeting was attended by more than 500 experts from 25 countries working on important activities including (i) a scene description for MPEG media, (ii) the integration of Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC) and Immersive Video (MIV), (iii) Video Coding for Machines (VCM), and (iv) a draft call for proposals for MPEG-I Audio among others.
 |
| MPEG picture at friday plenary; © Rob Koenen (Tiledmedia). |
Coded representation of immersive media – WG11 promotes Network-Based Media Processing (NBMP) to the final stage
At its 129th meeting, MPEG promoted ISO/IEC 23090-8, Network-Based Media Processing (NBMP), to Final Draft International Standard (FDIS). The FDIS stage is the final vote before a document is officially adopted as an International Standard (IS). During the FDIS vote, publications and national bodies are only allowed to place a Yes/No vote and are no longer able to make any technical changes. However, project editors are able to fix typos and make other necessary editorial improvements.What is NBMP? The NBMP standard defines a framework that allows content and service providers to describe, deploy, and control media processing for their content in the cloud by using libraries of pre-built 3rd party functions. The framework includes an abstraction layer to be deployed on top of existing commercial cloud platforms and is designed to be able to be integrated with 5G core and edge computing. The NBMP workflow manager is another essential part of the framework enabling the composition of multiple media processing tasks to process incoming media and metadata from a media source and to produce processed media streams and metadata that are ready for distribution to media sinks.
Why NBMP? With the increasing complexity and sophistication of media services and the incurred media processing, offloading complex media processing operations to the cloud/network is becoming critically important in order to keep receiver hardware simple and power consumption low.
Research aspects: NBMP reminds me a bit about what has been done in the past in MPEG-21, specifically Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) and Digital Item Processing (DIP). The main difference is that MPEG now targets APIs rather than pure metadata formats, which is a step forward in the right direction as APIs can be implemented and used right away. NBMP will be particularly interesting in the context of new networking approaches including, but not limited to, software-defined networking (SDN), information-centric networking (ICN), mobile edge computing (MEC), fog computing, and related aspects in the context of 5G.
Coded representation of immersive media – Publication of the Technical Report on Architectures for Immersive Media
At its 129th meeting, WG11 (MPEG) published an updated version of its technical report on architectures for immersive media. This technical report, which is the first part of the ISO/IEC 23090 (MPEG-I) suite of standards, introduces the different phases of MPEG-I standardization and gives an overview of the parts of the MPEG-I suite. It also documents use cases and defines architectural views on the compression and coded representation of elements of immersive experiences. Furthermore, it describes the coded representation of immersive media and the delivery of a full, individualized immersive media experience. MPEG-I enables scalable and efficient individual delivery as well as mass distribution while adjusting to the rendering capabilities of consumption devices. Finally, this technical report breaks down the elements that contribute to a fully immersive media experience and assigns quality requirements as well as quality and design objectives for those elements.Research aspects: This technical report provides a kind of reference architecture for immersive media, which may help identify research areas and research questions to be addressed in this context.
Multimedia content description interface – Conformance and Reference Software for Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis promoted to the final stage
Managing and organizing the quickly increasing volume of video content is a challenge for many industry sectors, such as media and entertainment or surveillance. One example task is scalable instance search, i.e., finding content containing a specific object instance or location in a very large video database. This requires video descriptors that can be efficiently extracted, stored, and matched. Standardization enables extracting interoperable descriptors on different devices and using software from different providers so that only the compact descriptors instead of the much larger source videos can be exchanged for matching or querying. ISO/IEC 15938-15:2019 – the MPEG Compact Descriptors for Video Analysis (CDVA) standard – defines such descriptors. CDVA includes highly efficient descriptor components using features resulting from a Deep Neural Network (DNN) and uses predictive coding over video segments. The standard is being adopted by the industry. At its 129th meeting, WG11 (MPEG) has finalized the conformance guidelines and reference software. The software provides the functionality to extract, match, and index CDVA descriptors. For easy deployment, the reference software is also provided as Docker containers.
Research aspects: The availability of reference software helps to conduct reproducible research (i.e., reference software is typically publicly available for free) and the Docker container even further contributes to this aspect.
DASH and CMAF
The 4th edition of DASH has already been published and is available as ISO/IEC 23009-1:2019. Similar to previous iterations, MPEG’s goal was to make the newest edition of DASH publicly available for free, with the goal of industry-wide adoption and adaptation. During the most recent MPEG meeting, we worked towards implementing the first amendment which will include additional (i) CMAF support and (ii) event processing models with minor updates; these amendments are currently in draft and will be finalized at the 130th MPEG meeting in Alpbach, Austria. An overview of all DASH standards and updates are depicted in the figure below:
The 2nd edition of the CMAF standard (ISO/IEC 23000-19) will be available soon (currently under FDIS ballot) and MPEG is currently reviewing additional tools in the so-called ‘technologies under considerations’ document. Therefore, amendments were drafted for additional HEVC media profiles and exploration activities on the storage and archiving of CMAF contents.
The next meeting will bring MPEG back to Austria (for the 4th time) and will be hosted in Alpbach, Tyrol. For more information about the upcoming 130th MPEG meeting click here.
Click here for more information about MPEG meetings and their developments
No comments:
Post a Comment