MPEG news: a report from the 100th meeting, Geneva, CH

The official press release is available here and I'd like to highlight two topics from MPEGs' 100th meeting in Geneva, Switzerland:

• "MP100E": MPEG celebrates its 100th meeting
• Systems news: ISOBMFF 4th edition, MDS social metadata, DASH conformance/refsw et al.
• WebVC and ARAF goes CD
• HEVC preliminary subjective test results publicly available

MPEG celebrates its 100th meeting

The 100th MPEG meeting was held in Geneva, Switzerland with a sponsored social event including honorific speeches by representatives of ISO, IEC, ITU-T, WIPO, JTC 1, SC 29, Sisvel, Samsung, and MERL. The ISO press release can be found here highlighting the win of three "Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards presented by the U.S. National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) for outstanding achievement in engineering and technical development. The awards covered:

• The MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard. The related ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group also received an Emmy Award for its role in the work on this standard
• MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 – compression coding associated with video CD and MP3, digital TV set top boxes and DVD."

Some additional pictures can be found here.

Systems news

ISOBMFF 4th edition: The "Text of ISO/IEC 14496-12 4th edition" has been approved which means the the ISO base media file format is available in its fourth edition (i.e., a consolidation of Amd.1, Amd.2, Amd.3, Cor.1-5). As previous editions, it shall become publicly available via ITTF Web site.

MDS social metadata: The fourth amendment of MPEG-7 MDS has been approved providing support  for social metadata such as ratings (like, 5-star) based on media, identity, and quality.

DASH conference/reference software: The committee draft for ISO/IEC 23009-2 has been approved adding conformance and reference software to DASH. In particular, MPD and segment conformance rules are defined and bitstreams are available. Furthermore, libdash has been selected as sample client. A public online MPD validator is available at http://dash.itec.aau.at.

WebVC and ARAF goes CD

WebVC: The committee draft of MPEG-4 Part 29 aka Web Video Coding (WebVC) has been approved which is compatible with the Constrained Baseline Profile of ISO/IEC 14996-10. In fact, WebVC is derived from the AVC specification with the purpose to define a coding format suitable for the Web. The CD is publicly available here.

ARAF: MPEG addresses the need for standards in the area of augmented realities by defining an application format. Hence, ARAF stands for Augmented Reality Application Format and will be defined as Part 13 of MPEG-A. The committee draft is publicly available here addressing use cases and requirements.

HEVC preliminary subjective test results publicly available

"The video subgroup recommends making the report on preliminary subjective testing N12475 publicly available."

N12475 is the Report on preliminary subjective testing of HEVC compression capability which can be found here. It shows impressive results as reported elsewhere, e.g., here. In particular, > 50% bitrate reduction, 67% in class B (HDTV), 49% in class C (WVGA) => mission accomplished! Currently, HEVC is between ballots and FDIS/IS is expected around Jan-Apr 2013.

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt participates in New FP7 Project on Social Networks

Social media applications have become a modern reality affecting a growing part of the population, as well as companies and public organisations. For example, twitter messages played an important role in the recent developments in Arab countries, while Flickr and YouTube are rich image and video collections based exclusively on user contributions and around 30 billion content items (links, photo albums, status updates) are posted on Facebook every month. It becomes clear that, much of what happens in the real-world is documented in real time by the millions of social network users that upload content, interact with each other, and give feedback (rate, comment) on already published online content. It is equally important that social networks and applications can be used for a plethora of diverse applications, beyond sharing, networking, news and entertainment. For example, they have been used for emergency planning and response, in travel and tourism, in e-government, and in product monitoring.

SocialSensor is a 3-year FP7 European Integrated Project, which aims at exploiting information in social networks and developing applications that enhance user experience. In the project framework, new techniques for analysis, aggregation and real-time search of user-generated content will be developed, in order to extract useful information and make it available for use in different applications. Innovative solutions from the fields of information extraction and retrieval, social network analysis, user modelling, semantic web services, and media adaptation, delivery and presentation, will compose a software platform that crawls and analyses multimedia User Generated Content from the social web, combines it with professional content, and makes it searchable for professional users, but also recommends, delivers and presents it to media consumers depending on their context and their personal profile. To achieve this, crucial issues have to be tackled, such as the sheer data volume, its heterogeneity and low quality.

The platform will be showcased and evaluated in two use cases: (a) news, involving professional news editors, journalists and casual readers, benefiting from the improved capabilities of SocialSensor for discovering new interesting social content and integrating it in the news creation and delivery lifecycle, and (b) infotainment, providing new multimedia search tools and unique media consumption experiences to attendants of large events (e.g. festivals). Providing real-time social indexing capabilities for both of these use cases is expected to have a transformational impact on both sectors.

In the project, whose total budget is €9.64 million, Alpen-Adria-Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt, Multimedia Communications Group participates, with research activities on media streaming and sharing within social networks. The consortium comprises 11 participants in total, coming from different universities and research organizations (CERTH-Informatics and Telematics Institute (co-ordinator), University of Koblenz-Landau, City University London, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), as well as from the IT industry and news domains (IBM Israel, Yahoo! Spain, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Deutsche Welle, Athens Technology Center, JCP-Consult).

For more information please contact: Dr. Christian Timmerer, AAU/TEWI/ITEC/MMC, christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at or the co-ordinators Dr. Ioannis Kompatsiaris, CERTH-ITI, ikom@iti.gr

Social Media Computing

Millions of people are using social networks and also the research community is working of scientific issues related to social networks. In this blog post I'd like to collect some articles that has been brought to my attention recently and are related to social media computing.

To begin with, the August'10 issue of IEEE Computer was dedicated to social networks containing one article entitled "Social Multimedia Computing" with the aim to bridge social science and multimedia technology:

• Abstract: The explosive growth of social multimedia content on the Internet is revolutionizing content distribution and social interaction. It has even led to a new research area, called social multimedia computing.
• Citation: Yonghong Tian, Jaideep Srivastava, Tiejun Huang, Noshir Contractor, "Social Multimedia Computing," Computer, vol. 43, no. 8, pp. 27-36, June 2010, doi:10.1109/MC.2010.188

Recently, I came along the blog post of Mathias Lux "Social Media, Tagging and Images Semantics" which leads to an article of Neela Sawant, Jia Li and James Z. Wang entitled Automatic image semantic interpretation using social action and tagging data that gives a survey over more than 200 papers in this area:

• Abstract: The plethora of social actions and annotations (tags, comments, ratings) from online media sharing Websites and collaborative games have induced a paradigm shift in the research on image semantic interpretation. Social inputs with their added context represent a strong substitute for expert annotations. Novel algorithms have been designed to fuse visual features with noisy social labels and behavioral signals. In this survey, we review nearly 200 representative papers to identify the current trends, challenges as well as opportunities presented by social inputs for research on image semantics. Our study builds on an interdisciplinary confluence of insights from image processing, data mining, human computer interaction, and sociology to describe the folksonomic features of users, annotations and images. Applications are categorized into four types: concept semantics, person identification, location semantics and event semantics. The survey concludes with a summary of principle research directions for the present and the future.

Finally, the same blog post contains a nice figure (see below) originating from a blog post of Frederic Cavazza on the "Social Media Landscape" already some time ago.

It provides - among others - an "infinity of tools and services" and an advice which I'd like to quote here: "Jump into the water!"

The same advice I'd like to give to you regarding the "Special Technical Community on Social Networking" that is currently being created within the IEEE Computer Society: Jump into the water and join this very exciting and new activity:

• Web: http://computer.org/stcsn
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/stcsn
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/stcsn