At its 153rd meeting, MPEG finished the development of four standardization projects. This included promoting two standards to International Standard (IS), one to Final Draft International Standard (FDIS), and one standard to Amendment (AMD), driving innovation in Systems, JVET, and Graphics coding, respectively:
Carriage of green metadata (IS)
Conformance and reference software for scene description (AMD)
The third edition of VVC conformance (IS)
Conformance and Reference Software for Low Complexity, Low Latency LiDAR Coding (FDIS)
At the 153rd MPEG meeting, MPEG Audio Coding (WG6) received two proposals to its Call for Proposals for Audio Coding for Machines (ACoM) issued at the 151st MPEG meeting. MPEG-ACoM aims to define a bitstream and data format for compressing audio, multi-dimensional streams, or features extracted from such signals that is efficient in terms of bitrate/size and can be used for machine analysis tasks or hybrid machine and human consumption. In addition, such a data format can be used to transport recorded audio data from sensor networks to machine listening units.
The call focused on lossless audio coding enabling the use of the same compression scheme for many different applications. The two proposals had been evaluated based on 1822 different audio samples from the use cases of “predictive maintenance”, “in-line testing”, “traffic monitoring and control”, “flexible medical data”, “user generated content”, “live stream content analysis” and “artistic creation”. One of the proposals had a small but statistically significant better compression rate for most of the use cases. Both proposals were based on the draft joint biomedical and general waveform coding (BWC) standard ISO/IEC 23003-8 and ITU-T T.261, which is a joint project of WG 6 MPEG Audio Coding and ITU-T Q6/21 (VCEG). The call for proposals of ACoM did not consider the complexity of the algorithm. On the other hand, the algorithms in BWC have already been optimized for lower complexity. To avoid duplication of standards and to optimize computational complexity, WG 6 and VCEG experts started to investigate how ACoM proposals can be merged into the ongoing BWC standard.
Please, visit the MPEG website (https://www.mpeg.org/153rd-meeting-of-mpeg/) for more details.