INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION FOR STANDARDISATION
ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE NORMALISATION
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11
CODING OF MOVING PICTURES AND AUDIO

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11
N2907
Oct 1999 / Melbourne, Australia

Title: Press Release of the 49th MPEG Meeting

Real-world applications to test MPEG-7 under development

Extending MPEG-2 video with production data

Melbourne, Vic, Australia, 11 October 1999 – At the 49^th MPEG meeting in Melbourne, Australia, the focus was now well on the MPEG-7 work, with MPEG-4 Version 2 being in its finalizing stages. Next meeting, MPEG-4 Version 2 will be Final Draft International Standard, which means that the text is final and MPEG will hand the standard over to ISO.

While the technical work on MPEG-7 is still in full swing, already experiments have been defined to test the utility of the descriptors and description schemes in real-world applications. The applications chosen are audiovisual production and biomedics. In the future, also other applications will be used to test MPEG-7. Also, the work on MPEG-7 Systems was kicked off at this meeting, the focus being on streaming and compression of MPEG-7 descriptions, the Description Definition Language and on transport over MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Systems as well as on analogue media. Industry has indicated that these aspects are important in the deployment of the MPEG-7 standard.

MPEG has succeeded in defining bounds on composition complexity, a vital element for manufacturers of MPEG-4 devices. These bounds (levels) give the maximum of pixels per second to be composited, or blended, together.

The 49^th MPEG meeting was held at the kind invitation of the Standards Australia. The meeting was hosted and organized by Standards Australia and sponsored by Motorola and Optus Communications.

Core experiment work continues, with very acceptable results occurring in the speech recognition and sound effects areas, resulting in continuation of experimentation towards descriptors. Work has begun in earnest on the musical instrument similarity descriptor, as well.

John Lazzaro and John Wawryznek of the Computer Science division of the University of California have developed a translator from MPEG4 Structured Audio to C, which is now stable enough for a developer release. It can be downloaded from www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/index.html

According to Eric Scheirer of MIT, one of the driving forces behind MPEG-4 Structured Audio, this is probably the first time that been two independent implementations (ie, not ported from the same codebase) of the same music language exist, that can share orchestras. "The fact that this has occurred not even six months after technical work ended on the standard demonstrates the power of standardization." says Scheirer.

Demonstrations were shown in the common implementation platform of MPEG-4 that is used within MPEG to develop the standard. Among them: MPEG-4 streaming over IP was shown to work between different companies, authoring tools were demonstrated and there was a demonstration of how watermarking video can be applied using MPEG-4's standardized Intellectual Property Management and Protection interfaces. Based upon the watermark, the MPEG-4 player was shown to refuse to play content when the appropriate password was not entered, or only to play in degraded quality.

MPEG has begun work to extend the capabilities of the MPEG-2 Video specification to carry production process information in a backward compatible way. These extended capabilities will enhance the MPEG-2 Video specification by providing a method for carrying information throughout the production and consumption of MPEG-2 video content. The most immediate use of this work is for display of decoded MPEG-2 Video on progressive displays. This extension will be carried out in cooperation with cross-industry forums.

Work is continuing to extend MPEG-4 video for studio applications at very high resolutions and rates ranging from 30 Mbit / s to 600 Mbit / s, and toward fine-grained scalable video, e.g. for packet-based distribution systems or statistical multiplexers used in digital broadcast.

Future MPEG meetings will be held in Maui, Hawaii (December 1999), Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands (March 2000), Beijing, China (July 2000), France (October 1999)

For further information about MPEG, please contact:

Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione (Convenor of MPEG)
CSELT
Via G. Reiss Romoli, 274
I-10148 Torino, ITALY
Tel.: +39 11 228 6120; Fax: +39 11 228 6299
Email: leonardo.chiariglione@cselt.it

or

Rob Koenen (Chairman MPEG Requirements Group)
KPN Research, Netherlands
tel. +31 70 332 5310
fax +31 70 332 5567
Email: r.h.koenen@research.kpn.com

This press release and much 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 Rob Koenen.

For more information, check the full Press Release of the 49th MPEG Meeting.