For its 149th meet-up, held mid-January in Geneva, Switzerland, the global media standards development org MPEG piled its plate high with standards and topics for its expert members to discuss, devour, and digest.

Unified Streaming’s Mohamad Raad joined MPEG 149 via screen. But being online-only didn’t hinder his ability to get things done.

According to the standardization representative, progress on standards was definitely made. One of the biggest of the big-ticket items consumed at the conference concerned media authenticity.

C2PA support rising

Broad industry acceptance of C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) has spurred MPEG to focus on specifying ways of delivering and using C2PA information, said Raad.

As next-generation video coding discussions coalesce, a common set of requirements has formed. As with everything else these days, said Raad, the next video compression standard will be AI-based.

MPEG Working Group 3, or WG03, has begun exploring media authenticity and provenance, indicating that this is an important topic to be addressed. Initially there was some concern about focusing on C2PA, according to Raad, but toward the end of the week, consensus that there is significant industry support for the C2PA specification had grown.

“Given that C2PA is also becoming an ISO standard, it makes sense for MPEG to at least develop some specifications that utilize C2PA or make it easier to deliver C2PA content,” Raad said.

AI’s arrived

JPEG stands for The Joint Photographic Experts Group. The international organization has developed a standard called JPEG-AI.

According to JPEG, JPEG-AI is “the creation of a learning-based image coding standard offering a single-stream, compact compressed domain representation, targeting both human visualization, with significant compression efficiency improvement over image coding standards in common use at equivalent subjective quality, and effective performance for image processing and computer vision tasks, with the goal of supporting a royalty-free baseline.”

Raad reports that the first part of JPEG-AI is in the FDIS (Final Draft International Standard) stage, so it’s almost a published international standard.

The file format for JPEG-AI is at the DIS (Draft International Standard) stage as well. The other parts of the standard, the profiling, conformance, and reference software parts, are at the committee draft stage, meaning they are probably a year away from getting to the FDIS stage.

MPEG is also defining an AI strategy, which means that AI most likely will be included in almost all future MPEG standards.

So both standards bodies, the experts groups covering the domains of still images and moving images, are busy preparing for artificial intelligence to pervade all image-based media, quite soon.

DASH: new edition

DASH, the abbreviation of MPEG-DASH, is a format: Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP.

DASH’s 6th edition contains a number of new features, notes Raad. The specification “certainly deserves close attention” as it expands DASH “significantly.”

Here are four highlights of DASH 6.

Alternative media presentation allows for parts of an ongoing presentation to be replaced by another presentation. The client may come back to the original presentation, or it may just continue playing the alternative presentation.

Content steering signalling allows for content to be switched between different sources.

CMCD support enables the client to send feedback to the content provider.

Nonlinear playback makes presentation timeline modifications possible. For example, it allows the different periods making up the timeline to be presented in a non-linear, and client-determined, fashion.

Looking forward

Standards for media are always in flux. Next up in this niche world: an online-only rendezvous at the end of March, MPEG 150.

Raad expects the media authenticity work to progress there.

“Sometimes things seem to move slowly at MPEG, but that usually results in highly desirable standards. Most MPEG experts will still be heavily focused on the next generation video coding standard as well.

“From the next meeting, I expect a clearer vision of what the next video compression standard will be expected to deliver,” Raad said.