Document WG1N91005
JPEG Committee issues a Call for Proposals on Holography coding
The 91st JPEG meeting was held online from 19 to 23 April 2021. This meeting saw several activities relating to holographic coding, notably the release of the JPEG Pleno Holography Call for Proposals, consolidated with the definition of the use cases and requirements for holographic coding and common test conditions that will assure the evaluation of the future proposals.
The 91st meeting was also marked by the start of a new exploration initiative on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), due to the recent interest in this technology in a large number of applications and in particular in digital art. Since NFTs rely on decentralized networks and JPEG has been analysing the implications of Blockchains and distributed ledger technologies in imaging, it is a natural next step to explore how JPEG standardization can facilitate interoperability between applications that make use of NFTs.
The following presents an overview of the major achievements carried out during the 91st JPEG meeting.
JPEG launches call for proposals for the first standard in holographic coding
JPEG Pleno aims to provide a standard framework for representing new imaging modalities, such as light field, point cloud, and holographic content. JPEG Pleno Holography is the first standardization effort for a versatile solution to efficiently compress holograms for a wide range of applications ranging from holographic microscopy to tomography, interferometry, and printing and display, as well as their associated hologram types. Key functionalities include support for both lossy and lossless coding, scalability, random access, and integration within the JPEG Pleno system architecture, with the goal of supporting a royalty free baseline.
The final Call for Proposals (CfP) on JPEG Pleno Holography – a milestone in the roll-out of the JPEG Pleno framework – has been issued as the main result of the 91st JPEG meeting, Online, 19-23 April 2021. The deadline for expressions of interest and registration is 1 August 2021. Submissions to the Call for Proposals are due on 1 September 2021.
A second milestone reached at this meeting was the promotion to International Standard of JPEG Pleno Part 2: Light Field Coding (ISO/IEC 21794-2). This standard provides light field coding tools originating from either microlens cameras or camera arrays. Part 1 of this standard, which was promoted to International Standard earlier, provides the overall file format syntax supporting light field, holography and point cloud modalities.
During the 91st JPEG meeting, the JPEG Committee officially began an exciting phase of JPEG Pleno Point Cloud coding standardisation with a focus on learning-based point cloud coding.
The scope of the JPEG Pleno Point Cloud activity is the creation of a learning-based coding standard for point clouds and associated attributes, offering a single-stream, compact compressed domain representation, supporting advanced flexible data access functionalities. The JPEG Pleno Point Cloud standard targets both interactive human visualization, with significant compression efficiency over state of the art point cloud coding solutions commonly used at equivalent subjective quality, and also enables effective performance for 3D processing and computer vision tasks. The JPEG Committee expects the standard to support a royalty-free baseline.
The standard is envisioned to provide a number of unique benefits, including an efficient single point cloud representation for both humans and machines. The intent is to provide humans with the ability to visualise and interact with the point cloud geometry and attributes while providing machines the ability to perform 3D processing and computer vision tasks in the compressed domain, enabling lower complexity and higher accuracy through the use of compressed domain features extracted from the original instead of the lossily decoded point cloud.
JPEG NFT
Non-Fungible Tokens have been the focus of much attention in recent months. Several digital assets that NFTs point to are either in existing JPEG formats or can be represented in current and emerging formats under development by the JPEG Committee. Furthermore, several trust and security issues have been raised regarding NFTs and the digital assets they rely on. Here again, JPEG Committee has a significant track record in security and trust in imaging applications. Building on this background, the JPEG Committee has launched a new exploration initiative around NFTs to better understand the needs in terms of imaging requirements and how existing as well as potential JPEG standards can help bring security and trust to NFTs in a wide range of applications and notably those that rely on contents that are represented in JPEG formats in still and animated pictures and 3D contents. The first steps in this initiative involve outreach to stakeholders in NFTs and its applications and organization of a workshop to discuss challenges and current solutions in NFTs, notably in the context of applications relevant to the scope of the JPEG Standardization Committee. JPEG Committee invites interested parties to subscribe to the mailing list of the JPEG NFT exploration.
JPEG Fake Media
The JPEG Fake Media exploration activity continues its work to assess standardization needs to facilitate secure and reliable annotation of media asset creation and modifications in good faith usage scenarios as well as in those with malicious intent. At the 91st meeting the JPEG Committee released an updated version of the “JPEG Fake Media Context, Use Cases and Requirements” document. This new version includes several refinements including an improved and coherent set of definitions covering key terminology. The requirements have been extended and reorganized in three main identified categories: media creation and modification descriptions, metadata embedding framework and authenticity verification framework. The presentations and video recording of the 2nd Workshop on JPEG Fake Media are now available on the JPEG website. JPEG invites interested parties to regularly visit the JPEG Fake Media webpage for the latest information and subscribe to the mailing list.
JPEG AI
At the 91st meeting, the results of the JPEG AI exploration experiments for the image processing and computer vision tasks defined at the previous 90th meeting were presented and discussed. Based on the analysis of the results, the exploration experiments description was improved. This activity will allow the definition of a performance assessment framework to use in the learning-based image codecs latent representation in several visual analysis tasks, such as compressed domain image classification and compressed domain material and texture recognition. Moreover, the impact of such experiments on the current version of the Common Test Conditions (CTC) was discussed.
Moreover, the draft of the Call for Proposals was analysed, notably regarding the training dataset and training procedures as well as the submission requirements. The timeline of the JPEG AI work item was discussed and it was agreed that the final Call for Proposals (CfP) will be issued as an outcome of the 93rd JPEG Meeting. The deadline for expression of interest and registration is 5 November 2021. Further, submission of bitstreams and decoded images for the test dataset are due on 30 January 2022.
JPEG Systems
During the 91st meeting, the Draft International Standard (DIS) text of JLINK (ISO/IEC 19566-7) and Committee Draft (CD) text of JPEG Snack (ISO/IEC 19566-8) were completed and will be submitted for ballot. Amendments for JUMBF (ISO/IEC 19566-5 AMD1) and JPEG 360 (ISO/IEC 19566-6 AMD1) received a final review and are being released for publication. In addition, new extensions to JUMBF (ISO/IEC 19566-5) are under consideration to support rapidly emerging use cases related to content authenticity and integrity; updated use cases and requirements are being drafted. Finally, discussions have started to create awareness on how to interact with JUMBF boxes and the information they contain, without breaking integrity or interoperability. Interested parties are invited to subscribe to the mailing list of the JPEG Systems AHG in order to contribute to the above activities.
JPEG XS
The second editions of JPEG XS Part 1 (Core coding system) and Part 3 (Transport and container formats) were prepared for Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) balloting, with the intention of having both standards published by October 2021. The second editions integrate new coding and signalling capabilities to support RAW Bayer colour filter array (CFA) images, 4:2:0 sampled images and mathematically lossless coding of up to 12-bits per component. The associated profiles and buffer models are handled in Part 2, which is currently under DIS ballot. The focus now has shifted to work on the second editions of Part 4 (Conformance testing) and Part 5 (Reference software). Finally, the JPEG Committee defined a study to investigate future improvements to high dynamic range (HDR) and mathematically lossless compression capabilities, while still honouring the low-complexity and low-latency requirements. In particular, for RAW Bayer CFA content, the JPEG Committee will work on extensions of JPEG XS supporting lossless compression of CFA patterns at sample bit depths above 12 bits.
JPEG XL
The JPEG Committee has finalized JPEG XL Part 2 (File format), which is now at the FDIS stage. A Main profile has been specified in draft Amendment 1 to Part 1, which entered the draft amendment (DAM) stage of the approval process at the current meeting. The draft Main profile has two levels: Level 5 for end-user image delivery and Level 10 for generic use cases, including image authoring workflows. Now that the criteria for conformance have been determined, the JPEG Committee has defined new core experiments to define a set of test codestreams that provides full coverage of the coding tools. Part 4 (Reference software) is now at the DIS stage. With the first edition FDIS texts of both Part 1 and Part 2 now complete, JPEG XL is ready for a wide adoption.
JPEG DNA
The JPEG Committee has continued its exploration of coding of images in quaternary representation, particularly suitable for DNA storage. After a successful third workshop presentation by stakeholders, two new use cases were identified along with a large number of new requirements, and a new version of the JPEG DNA overview document was issued and is now made publicly available. It was decided to continue this exploration by organizing a fourth workshop and conducting further outreach to stakeholders, as well as continuing with improving the JPEG DNA overview document.
Interested parties are invited to consider joining the effort by registering to the mailing list of JPEG DNA.
JPEG Reference Software
The JPEG Committee is pleased to announce that its standard on the JPEG reference software, 2nd edition, reached the state of International Standard and will be publicly available from both ITU and ISO/IEC.
This standard, to appear as ITU-T T.873 | ISO/IEC 10918-7 (2nd Edition) provides reference implementations to the first JPEG standard, used daily throughout the world. The software included in this document guides vendors on how JPEG (ISO/IEC 10918-1) can be implemented and may serve as a baseline and starting point for JPEG encoders or decoders.
This second edition updates the two reference implementations to their latest versions, fixing minor defects in the software.
"JPEG standards continue to be a motor of innovation and an enabler of new applications in imaging as witnessed by the release of the first standard for coding of holographic content.” said Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi, the Convenor of the JPEG Committee.
About JPEG
The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a Working Group of ISO/IEC, the International Organisation for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission, (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1) and of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG16), responsible for the popular JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, JPSearch, JPEG XT and more recently, the JPEG XS, JPEG Systems, JPEG Pleno, JPEG XL and JPEG AI families of imaging standards.
The JPEG Committee nominally meets four times a year. The 90th JPEG Meeting was held online from 18 to 22 January 2021. The next 92nd JPEG Meeting will be held online from 7 to 13 July 2021.
More information about JPEG and its work is available at jpeg.org or by contacting of the JPEG Communication Subgroup.
If you would like to stay posted on JPEG activities, please subscribe to the jpeg-news mailing list.
Future JPEG meetings are planned as follows:
- No 92, will be held online during 7 to 13 July 2021.
- No 93, is planned to be held in Berlin, Germany during 16-22 October 2021.
A zip package containing the official JPEG logo and logos of all JPEG standards can be downloaded here.