ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 N3620
October 2000 – La Baule, France
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MPEG Defines Binary Form for efficient streaming and storage of MPEG-7/ XML Data
La Baule, France, November 2000 – At its 54th meeting, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) wrote the first draft of a revolutionary binary format for MPEG-7, which will allow fast streaming of MPEG-7/XML data and a number of other features that are very difficult to achieve with a text-based representation. The binary descriptions of content can now be sent progressively, adding more detail as more data arrives, and on top of that, the binary format allows very rapid random access. Efficient representation and random access to all types of metadata is crucially important because metadata repositories will be of enormous size. The Binary format is part of the first official publication of the MPEG-7 Standard, the ‘Committee Draft’. MPEG-7 will progress through 3 more stages, to be frozen in July 2001.
The Call for Proposals for technology for ‘Intellectual Property Management and Protection’ resulted in 14 high quality proposals for additional standardization in MPEG. There is broad consensus on standardizing additional interfaces in MPEG-4; these will notably address renewability of IPMP tools (watermarking, cryptographic algorithms, etc.), without standardizing the tools themselves. Users will benefit from this, because it will become easier to create interoperable secure systems, which will result in more transparent access to valuable content.
The first two Calls for Proposals for MPEG-21 (Multimedia Framework) were issued: one for ‘Digital Item Declaration’ and one for ‘Digital Item Identification and Description’. The first Call requests technology that describes how content packages are structured as digital objects with a standard representation, identification and description within the MPEG-21 framework. The second Call asks for technology to uniquely and persistently identify and describe digital content items. Both calls are the first technological steps towards the goal of MPEG-21: to describe a multimedia framework of standards that together ensure open and interoperable access to multimedia content. Many elements of such a framework exist, and MPEG-21 will try to harmonize these and see that the necessary glue is provided, either by MPEG or by other appropriate bodies.
With the two Calls for Proposals (CfP) that were issued at the meeting, the technical work for MPEG-21, the technical work has started. The responses to the ‘Digital Item Declaration’ CfP are due at the January meeting, while the responses for the Digital Item Identification and Description CfP are expected in March.
Six of the seven parts of the MPEG-7 Standard (Systems, Description Definition Language, Visual, Audio, Multimedia Description Schemes, Reference Software) reached their first public draft status in La Baule: Committee Draft, or ‘CD’. This Draft will be balloted by the ISO member countries. Two more such ballots follow; the MPEG-7 Standard will be frozen in July 2001. The 7th part, Conformance Testing, is scheduled to follow the other parts a year later.
MPEG has decided to include, in MPEG-7, ‘Description Schemes’ for Electronic Ink documents. MPEG recognizes the demands arising from the currently emerging markets for pen-based systems and electronic whiteboards. Electronic ink data occupies a unique place among visual data objects. It represents handwritten text, formulas, graphics and drawing. Electronic Ink data description involves visual, semantic information as well as the characterization of the dynamic nature of handwriting and drawing.
First technology was specified in the MPEG-7 Visual CD that allows extracting descriptors for the purpose of recognizing and identifying faces in images and video. MPEG issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) for Face Recognition Technology, to identify and compare new technology in this domain with existing face descriptors in MPEG-7. MPEG intends to standardize extended and improved face descriptors in a future edition of MPEG-7. Results of the call will be evaluated at the March 2001 MPEG meeting.
The Audio Committee Draft (CD) contains a range of meta-data technology from singular descriptors to description schemes, which are sets of descriptors that work together. Some of the low-level, generic audio descriptors in the CD are fundamental frequency, spectrum envelopes and spectral centroid. One of the simpler description schemes is Timbre Description, which uses a set of descriptors to describe the distinctive characteristics of the musical instruments based on their recorded signals. This is used in identifying segments of other recorded signals that contain similar sounding instruments. The Spoken Content description scheme is more complex. It is designed to represent the output of a great number of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, which might contain both words and phoneme representations of the speech content, together with transition likelihoods from one sound unit to another. This ameliorates a problem with ASR systems: uncertain word recognition and out-of-vocabulary words. Using this rich representation, one can get excellent results from a key-word query on a database of annotated spoken content even when the annotation may have uncertainty or even incorrect speech recognition results.
The MPEG-7 Reference Software known as eXperimentation Model (XM) is a platform for implementing applications of the emerging MPEG-7 standard. The software has a modular design, and supports search & retrieval as well as transcoding applications (e.g., transforming a full resolution video into a short multimedia summary). The current revision of the XM software can be found at cvs@cvshost.krdl.org.sg. From time to time a snapshot from the current version of the XM software is taken and can be downloaded from the Web site: http://www.lis.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de/research/bv/topics/mmdb/mpeg7.html
MPEG has started to make a standard portable VHDL (hardware description language) reference code for the MPEG-4 Standard. This is a sizeable but very important task that will greatly help implementers and chip makers to work together in building MPEG-4 systems. MPEG expects benefits especially in the mobile multimedia market, where relatively much of the technology needs to be hardwired.
Recognizing the growing industry acceptance of the MPEG-4 video standard in various application domains, MPEG makes every effort to ensure that those who employ MPEG standards benefit from the best compression technology in existence. Hence, MPEG has decided to study whether new video compression technology exists that warrants standardization, and a Call for Proposals (CfP) was issued at this meeting asking for submission of new video compression tools. In February 2001, these will be formally tested against existing MPEG-4 video coding technology. The results will be discussed at the March 2001 MPEG meeting. Depending of the outcome MPEG may decide either to not take further action, to enhance the MPEG-4 visual standard, or to develop a new video coding standard.
Work started on the MPEG-4 Animation Framework extension, AFX. AFX–pronounced "effects"–defines extended representation and compression for advanced, high quality animation services, both in 2D and 3D.The MPEG-4 AFX spec is scheduled for delivery by October 2002. It will provide the latest animation technology for traditional and online graphics industries. The AFX specification is being developed in cooperation with the Web3D Consortium (www.web3d.org)
Further information
Future MPEG meetings will be held as follows: 15-19 January 2001 (Pisa, Italy), 5-9 March 2001 (Singapore), 23-27 July 2001 (Eilat, Israel), 15-19 October 2001 (Washingon DC, USA)
For further information about MPEG, please contact:
Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, (Convenor of MPEG, Italy)
CSELT
Via G. Reiss Romoli, 274
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, The Netherlands)
Tel +31 10 485 82 15
Email: rob.koenen@hetnet.nl
This press release and much other MPEG-related information can be found on the MPEG homepage:
http://www.cselt.it/mpeg
For the Outstanding Call for Proposals, see the Hot News section, http://www.cselt.it/mpeg/hot_news.htm
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 54th MPEG Meeting.
Heiko Purnhagen 07-Feb-2001