INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION FOR STANDARDISATION
ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE NORMALISATION
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11
CODING OF MOVING PICTURES AND AUDIO
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11
MPEG98/N2403 (Audio)
October 1998 / Atlantic City, NJ, USA
Source: Audio Subgroup
Title: Audio Press Release of the 45th MPEG Meeting
The 45th MPEG meeting took place from 12 - 16 October, in Atlantic City, NJ, at the invitation of American National Standards Institute and Sarnoff Corporation.
At this meeting ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) completed the technical work on the specification of version 1 of the MPEG-4 standard. MPEG-4 is an ISO/IEC standard being developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group), the committee which also developed the Emmy Award winning standards known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. These standards made interactive video on CD-ROM and Digital Television possible. MPEG-4 is the result of another international effort involving hundreds of researchers and engineers from all over the world. MPEG-4 is building on the proven success of three fields: digital television, interactive graphics applications (synthetic content) and the World Wide Web (distribution of and access to content) and provides the standardized technological elements enabling the integration of the production, distribution and content access paradigms of the three fields. One significant highlight of this WG11 meeting was the demonstration of an interactive MPEG-4 technology playing content seamlessly integrated from an IP network, a local area network, and a satellite network.
Completion of MPEG-4 Version 1 does not complete the work of WG11. WG11 has already began the work to define an enhanced backward compatible version of MPEG-4 which will be completed within one year.
WG11 has also embarked upon a new work item, entitled "A content description interface" more commonly referred to as MPEG-7. Significant progress has been made in developing an understanding of the requirements for such an interface. The increasing maturity of the technologies addressing these requirements indicates the technologies necessary to enable MPEG-7 are now available. In recognition of this, MPEG has issued a call for technologies addressing the key technology areas for MPEG-7.
WG11 is pleased to see the continuing application of the technology that its members have worked so hard to perfect. The latest example is the announcement of the European Broadcasting Union's (EBU) new digital network in the September 1998 issue of the Eurovision Network Services newsletter. In this newsletter, the EBU announce that their analogue network has finally been assigned to the history books. On 25th August 1998 the EBU switch completely to their new digital format Eurovision network. This is based on MPEG-2 4:2:2 Professional Profile @ Main Level technology, with links at 8, 12 and 24 Mbit/s. The links have been used for many events, including the Football World Cup (France'98). WG11 wish the EBU Eurovision Network every success in their pioneering venture into all digital operation.
Audio Coding Tools
The WG11 audio group have approved for progression to Final Draft International Standard the audio part of the MPEG-4 standard. The final draft covers a variety of audio applications, from a low bitrate of 2 kb/s/ch - for communications applications, through medium bitrates of 16 to 24 kb/s/ch - for Internet radio and related applications, up to full broadcast quality applications at 64 kb/s/ch. The Audio standard supports natural speech and audio, synthetic or structured audio (e.g. music synthesis) and provides a communications interface for Text to Speech (TTS) applications with facial body animation control.
Test results showing the remarkable performance and flexible functionalities of some of the audio coding tools for speech coding and coding for Audio on the Internet were reported to the 45th meeting of MPEG in Atlantic City. For example, the HVXC parametric speech coder working at 2 kb/s was able to offer superior performance to an established standardised telecom codec working at more than twice the bitrate. The test results included formalised results for the MPEG-4 audio scalable codecs, including mono/stereo scalability. These show good results for the scalable profiles comparable to results from well known fixed bitrate codecs.
As a result of successful demonstrations being presented to the appropriate expert groups, the TTSI (text-to-speech interface) has had the essential functionality of FBA (face and body animation) bookmarks added to it. This enables, for the first time, the synchronisation of synthetic speech and the supporting facial expressions, so necessary in the context of visual/aural modelling of a synthetic person.
Work has also continued on additional functionalities that will be added to MPEG-4 as soon as the technology is mature and proven. The principle requirement for such an addition is that it should work in a manner that is entirely compatibly with the current MPEG-4 specification. Within this umbrella are tools for very low delay audio coding, error resilience and environmental spatialisation. The means by which these functions will be added have been decided as have the basis on which their performance will be judged.
The new enquiry and study, known as MPEG-7 Multimedia Content Description Interface, has successfully progressed to the stage where a formal Call for Proposals, supported by the necessary definition of requirements, has been released from this meeting. The Call requests proposals to be advised by a cut off date of 1st December 1998 and formal submissions to be presented by 1st February 1999.
Future MPEG meetings will be held in Israel (December '98), Korea (March '99), Canada (July '99), Australia (October '99) and Hawaii (December '99).
For further information about MPEG, please contact:
Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, (Convenor of MPEG)
CSELT
Via G. Reiss Romoli, 2743
10148 Torino, ITALY
Tel.: +39 11 228 6120; Fax: +39 11 228 6299
Email: leonardo.chiariglione@cselt.it
This press release and a wealth of other MPEG-related information can be found on the MPEG homepage:
http://www.cselt.it/mpeg
The MPEG homepage 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.
Journalists that wish to receive MPEG Press Releases automatically can contact the author:
Rob Koenen
KPN Research, Netherlands
tel. +31 70 332 5310
fax +31 70 332 5567
Email: r.h.koenen@research.kpn.com
For more information, check the full Press Release of the 45th MPEG Meeting.
Heiko Purnhagen 05-Nov-1998