MPEG completes more elements of the MPEG-21 standard - recreated

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MPEG completes more elements of the MPEG-21 standard

Busan, Republic of Korea April 29, 2005 – The MPEG-21 suite of standards took another step forward this week at its 72nd meeting – hosted by the Korean National Body in Busan, Korea - with the completion of the Reference Software (Part 8) and Digital Item Processing (Part 10).

At its next meeting in Pozan, Poland in July, MPEG will hold an open-to-all seminar on the MPEG-21 Standards. See the information below for more details.

Reference software is an important aspect of MPEG’s activities. Reference software source code is contributed by participating experts and integrated into a package that is made freely available to anyone who wishes to use it to develop products that conform to MPEG standards – in this case, MPEG-21.

MPEG provides freely available reference software packages for all of its standards. The availability of these packages is accomplished by having each contributing expert assign the copyright of their contribution to ISO/IEC while the originator also retains it for their future use and purposes. ISO/IEC, in-turn, permits the use of the reference source code for any conforming implementation of the associated standard.

This provides industry with invaluable assistance in implementing MPEG’s standards, and this now includes MPEG-21.

MPEG also completed another important element in the suite of standards known as MPEG-21.

MPEG-21 Digital Item Processing (Part 10) is an executable means for the content creator to inform the consumer what is intended to be done with content that has been acquired.

A standardized API provides the means for peer applications that can even be executables in the form of scripts or applets. This is a powerful means to imbed simple or complex processing tasks along with content.

This has the potential for making the notion of Digital Items not just a container that MPEG-21 standardized, but a smart and very versatile container.

MPEG-21 is now largely complete at this stage. The MPEG-21 Digital Item
container can house such things as the MPEG 21 Rights Expression Language to manage content usage based on the terms of the Rights Data Dictionary, the MPEG-21 Digital Adaptation and Digital Item Processing expressions to manage, manipulate and process content, the File Format for carrying all this around and the soon-to-be-completed MPEG-21 Event Reporting for feedback related to actions taken by the client device.

All of this is (or will be) embodied in the reference software to make implementation easier. MPEG-21 contains one other important element.

The MPEG Committee’s core competency is compression and compressed formats. MPEG-21 is no less an MPEG standard and now has a binary format standard that is closely aligned with the XML binarisation standard developed for MPEG-7 (ISO/IEC 15938).

It is also closely aligned with the binary form of XML as specified by the W3C, but has the additional important property that it possesses the inherent MPEG notion of synchronization, required for such things as lip-sync in audio-video content.

The other aspect of MPEG’s legacy is real-time or streamed delivery of audio-video information. MPEG-21 will add (see Call for Proposals lower down) a Digital Item Streaming standard to its already very popular File Format standard for network transport of audio-video information.

As stated, MPEG-21 is now largely complete. However, as with all MPEG standards, new technology will continue to be added as industry needs dictate.

Another new aspect of MPEG standardization has emerged; that of the Multimedia Application Format standard know as MPEG-A. The objective of this new suite of standards is to utilize already-completed MPEG technology in the real world applications by combining selected technologies into a standards based package that can be actually be built.

The first of these to be completed is a music player. The Music Player Application Format specifies how one of the most popular MPEG standards, widely known as "MP3" (ISO/IEC 11172-3 Layer III Audio), can be incorporated in an MPEG-4 framework, allowing the MPEG-4 file format container and systems framework to be used to store and transmit MP3-coded music.

The applications standard also includes the ability to carry MPEG-7 metadata and JPEG still images, thus making it a complete music album application that can be used by search and filtering tools to acquire the content and a complete album package including artwork and text.

Other MPEG news
MPEG has also begun work on several standards requested of it by industry experts. Symbolic Music Representation and Multimedia Middleware are two such projects now on a path toward standardization.

The goal of the Symbolic Music Representation is to facilitate music education and content distribution by providing the ability to integrate music representation into other aspects of MPEG-4 standards.

As the world is aware, MPEG-4 is the object-based media coding standard. The addition of symbolic music objects will be a powerful tool for specifying object composition rules when combined with the other media objects types in the MPEG-4 Standard.

The second effort launched at the 72nd meeting is known as M3W (Multi Media MiddleWare). Industry is producing a vast new array of devices on which to produce and consume audio-video content. M3W aims to improve the portability of applications and services by defining a series of APIs than can evolve as middleware technology itself evolves.

The response to MPEG’s Call for Proposals (see the MPEG press release issued for the Hong Kong, China meeting, 28 January 2005) demonstrated interest and technology that can be standardized in this area.

However, gaps have been identified, and MPEG has extended its CfP to collect further input in the area of Multimedia APIs and Security Requirements (Part 5 and section 7.2.3 of the M3W Requirements Version 2 respectively).

Call for Proposals on Digital Item Streaming
MPEG’s heritage is real-time delivery of audio-video content and associated information. That tradition continues, with a call for proposals on streaming MPEG-21 Digital Items and associated information carried within a digital item.

Unlike web-based delivery, in which an entire digital item would typically be delivered in a single burst, streaming requires fragmented delivery and reassembly, sometimes from out-of-sequence acquisition as well as from multiple sources.

The call requests technologies including delivery over multiple channels, random access and other techniques that will be useful in streaming DIs.

Call for Proposals on Fixed-point 8x8 IDCT and DCT
The implementation of decoders for several MPEG video coding standards (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 Part 2) as well as the JPEG still-image coding standard and the ITU video coding standards H.261 and H.263 requires the implementation of an approximation of the 8x8 inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) function.

In addition, in practical terms, the implementation of encoders for these standards requires the implementation of approximations of both the IDCT and a forward discrete cosine transform (forward DCT, or simply DCT). MPEG believes that a widely used fixed-point design could improve the stability of encoder/decoder interoperation, resulting in higher decoded video fidelity.

It would also reduce the design effort needed to produce implementations of theses standards. However, this new fixed-point standard would be a technology that is offered in addition to the existing ones, and its use will not be mandated in existing MPEG standards.

MPEG is, therefore, considering the need for development of a new standard specifying a particular fixed-point approximation to the ideal IDCT function, and possibly containing an additional (non-normative) example particular fixed-point approximation to the ideal forward DCT function.

As use of this approximation will be voluntary, existing implementations will continue to function as well as they did before without alteration.

Pre-Call for Proposals on 3D Audiovisual Coding
There have been many recent input documents brought to MPEG on "free viewpoint video", in which multiple-view video coding techniques show improved coding efficiency over existing MPEG compression tools.

It is now recognized that multiple view video coding is a key technology that can serve a wide variety of applications, including FTV (free-viewpoint television), 3DTV (3D television) and surveillance. A preliminary assessment indicates that significant compression improvement can be achieved for the case of encoding multiple camera views of the same scene. MPEG will issue its final call in July, with results to be evaluated in October of 2005.

Details of how to obtain MPEG’s Calls for Proposal’s (CfPs) and other public information about MPEG and its technology standards work is shown below.

MPEG-21 Workshop in Poznan, Poland
On Wednesday July 27th, the experts of MPEG will give a seminar on the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework . This will be an open-to-all seminar that will explain the acronyms and jargon surrounding MPEG-21 that many in industry have been hearing about for several years.

What are DID or DIA, DII, FF, REL and RDD? These questions will be demystified by those who created the standard – the MPEG experts. How all of these fit into a framework and how that framework and all of the parts of MPEG-21 work together as well as with the other MPEG standards will also be covered in this exciting afternoon in Poznan.

Don’t miss the opportunity to attend this seminar to be held in the middle of an MPEG week at the 73rd meeting in Poznan, Poland. See the MPEG website for details and registration information.

Workshops on Future Multimedia Developments
Periodically, MPEG seeks to understand if there are potentially-important new technology developments for future video and audio Codec standardization.

After completing AVC, MPEG is again reaching out to the community of experts both inside and outside of MPEG. Therefore, MPEG has organized two workshops to explore future directions in video compression as first steps in a process devised to identify video coding standardization opportunities.

The workshops are designed explore technical and other viewpoints, including video coding features, that are required by the potential video compression-related products and applications of tomorrow.

The first workshop took place in the afternoon of Wednesday, 20 April, 2005 in Busan, Korea, and included a series of short presentations on issues, technologies and applications.

This was followed by a discussion session to identify the most important trends. Partly based on the trends identified in Busan, a second full-day workshop is planned to be held on Sunday, 16 October, 2005 in Nice, France, including new subjects, tutorials and expert discussions. For the associated details, see the Calls for further information on the MPEG Website.

Future MPEG meetings are as follows:
- Poznan, Poland July 25-29, 2005
- Nice, France, October 17-21, 2005
- Bangkok, Thailand 16-20 January 2006

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 the Calls.

The MPEG homepage also has links to other MPEG pages, which are maintained by some of the subgroups. It also contains links to public documents that are freely available for download to non-MPEG members.