NEWS & PRESS
97th Meeting – Online - JPEG initiates specification on fake media based on responses to its call for proposals - December 11, 2022


Document WG1N100297

JPEG initiates specification on fake media based on responses to its call for proposals

The 97th JPEG meeting was held online from 24 to 28 October 2022. JPEG received responses to the Call for Proposals (CfP) on JPEG Fake Media, the first multimedia international standard designed to facilitate the secure and reliable annotation of media assets creation and modifications. In total six responses were received addressing different requirements in the scope of this standardization initiative. Moreover, relevant advances were made on the standardization of learning-based coding, notably the learning-based coding of images, JPEG AI, and JPEG Pleno point cloud coding. Furthermore, the explorations on quality assessment of images, JPEG AIC, and of JPEG Pleno light field had relevant advances with the definition of their Calls for Contributions and Common Test Conditions.

The following summarizes the major achievements of the 97th JPEG meeting.

JPEG Fake Media

In April 2022, the JPEG Committee released a Final Call for Proposals on JPEG Fake Media. The scope of JPEG Fake Media is the creation of a standard that can facilitate the secure and reliable annotation of media assets creation and modifications. The standard shall address use cases that are in good faith as well as those with malicious intent. During the 97th meeting in October 2022, the following six responses to the call were presented:

  1. Adobe/C2PA: C2PA Specification
  2. Huawei: Provenance and Right Management for Digital Contents in JPEG Fake Media
  3. Sony Group Corporation: Methods to keep track provenance of media asset and signing data
  4. Vrije Universiteit Brussel/imec: Media revision history tracking via asset decomposition and serialization
  5. UPC: MIPAMS Provenance module
  6. Newcastle University: Response to JPEG Fake Media standardization call

In the coming months, these proposals will be thoroughly evaluated following a process that is open, transparent, fair and unbiased and allows deep technical discussions to assess which proposals best address identified requirements. Based on the conclusions of these discussions, a new standard will be produced to address fake media and provide solutions for transparency related to media authenticity. The standard will combine the best elements of the six proposals.

To stay informed about the activities please join the JPEG Fake Media & NFT AHG mailing list and regularly check the JPEG website for the latest information.

JPEG AI

JPEG AI (ISO/IEC 6048) aims at the development 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 state-of-the-art image coding standards at similar subjective quality, and improved performance for image processing and computer vision tasks. The evaluation of the Call for Proposals responses had already confirmed the industry interest, and the subjective tests presented at the 96th JPEG meeting showed results that significantly outperform conventional image compression solutions.

The JPEG AI verification model has been issued as the outcome of this meeting and follows the integration effort of several neural networks and tools. There are several characteristics that make the JPEG AI Verification Model (VM) unique, such as the decoupling of the entropy decoding from the sample reconstruction and the exploitation of the spatial correlation between latents using a prediction and a fusion network as well as a massively parallelized auto-regressive network. The performance evaluation has shown significant RD performance improvements (as much as 32.2% of BD-rate over H.266/VVC) with competitive decoding complexity. Other functionalities such as rate adaptation and device interoperability have also been addressed with the use of gain units and the quantization of the weights in the entropy decoding module. Moreover, the adoption process for architectural changes and for new or improved coding tools in JPEG AI VM was approved. A set of core experiments have been defined for improving the JPEG AI VM and target the improvement of the coding efficiency and the reduction of the encoding and decoding complexity. The core experiments represent a set of promising technologies, such as learning-based GAN training, simplification of the analysis/synthesis transform, adaptive entropy coding alphabet, and even encoder-only tools and procedures for training speed-up.

JPEG Pleno Learning-based Point Cloud coding

The JPEG Pleno Point Cloud activity progressed at this meeting with the successful validation of the Verification Model under Consideration (VMuC). The VMuC was confirmed as the Verification Model (VM) to form the core of the future standard; ISO/IEC 21794 Part 6 JPEG Pleno: Learning-based Point Cloud Coding. The JPEG Committee has commenced work on the Working Draft of the standard, with initial text reviewed at this meeting. Prior to the next 98th JPEG Meeting, JPEG experts will investigate possible advancements to the VM in the area of auto-regressive entropy encoding and sparse tensor convolution as well as sourcing additional point clouds for the JPEG Pleno Point Cloud test set.

JPEG Pleno Light Field

During the 97th meeting, the JPEG Committee released the “JPEG Pleno Final Call for Contributions on Subjective Light Field Quality Assessment”, to collect new procedures and best practices regarding light field subjective quality evaluation methodologies to assess artifacts induced by coding algorithms. All contributions, including test procedures, datasets, and any additional information, will be considered to develop the standard by consensus among the JPEG experts following a collaborative process approach. The deadline for submission of contributions is April 1, 2023.

The JPEG Committee organized its 1st workshop on light field quality assessment to discuss challenges and current solutions for subjective light field quality assessment, explore relevant use cases and requirements, and provide a forum for researchers to discuss the latest findings in this area. The JPEG Committee also promoted its 2nd workshop on learning-based light field coding to exchange experiences and to present technological advances in learning-based coding solutions for light field data. The proceedings and video footage of both workshops are now accessible on the JPEG website.

JPEG AIC

At the 97th JPEG Meeting, a new JPEG AIC Final Call for Contributions on Subjective Image Quality Assessment was issued. The JPEG Committee is working on the continuation of the previous standardization efforts (AIC-1 and AIC-2) and aims at developing a new standard, known as AIC-3. The new standard will be focusing on the methodologies for quality assessment of images in a range that goes from high quality to near-visually lossless quality, which are not covered by the previous AIC standards.

The Call for Contributions on Subjective Image Quality Assessment is asking for contributions to the standardization process that will be collaborative from the very beginning. In this context, all received contributions will be considered for the development of the standard by consensus among the JPEG experts.

The JPEG Committee will be releasing a new JPEG AIC-3 Dataset on the 15th of December 2022. And the deadline for submitting contributions to the call is set to the 1st of April 2023 23:59 UTC. The contributors will be presenting their contributions at the 99th JPEG Meeting in April 2023.

The Call for Contributions on Subjective Image Quality Assessment addresses the development of a suitable subjective evaluation methodology standard. A second stage will address the objective perceptual visual quality evaluation models that perform well and have a good discriminative power in the high quality to near-visually lossless quality range.

JPEG DNA

The JPEG Committee has continued its exploration of the coding of images in quaternary representations, as it is particularly suitable for DNA storage applications. The scope of JPEG DNA is the creation of a standard for efficient coding of images that considers biochemical constraints and offers robustness to noise introduced by the different stages of the storage process that is based on DNA synthetic polymers. During the 97th JPEG meeting, the JPEG DNA Benchmark Codec and the JPEG DNA Common Test Conditions were updated to allow for additional concrete experiments to take place prior to issuing a draft call for proposals at the next meeting. This will also allow further validation and extension of the JPEG DNA benchmark codec to simulate an end-to-end image storage pipeline using DNA and in particular include biochemical noise simulation which is an essential element in practical implementations.

JPEG XS

The 2nd edition of JPEG XS is now fully completed and published. The JPEG Committee continues its work on the 3rd edition of JPEG XS, starting with Part 1 (Core coding system) and Part 2 (Profiles and buffer models). These editions will address new use cases and requirements for JPEG XS by defining additional coding tools to further improve the coding efficiency, while keeping the low-latency and low-complexity core aspects of JPEG XS. The primary goal of the 3rd edition is to deliver the same image quality as the 2nd edition, but with half of the required bandwidth. During the 97th JPEG meeting, a new Working Draft of Part 1 and a first Working Draft of Part 2 were created. To support the work a new Core Experiment was also issued to further test the proposed technology. Finally, an update to the JPEG XS White Paper has been published.

JPEG 2000

A new edition of Rec. ITU-T T.803 | ISO/IEC 15444-4 (JPEG 2000 conformance) is under development.

This new edition proposes to relax the maximum allowable errors so that well-designed 16-bit fixed-point implementations pass all compliance tests; adds two test codestreams to facilitate testing of inverse wavelet and component decorrelating transform accuracy, and adds several codestreams and files conforming to Rec. ITU-T 801 |ISO/IEC 15444-2 to facilitate the implementation of decoders and file format readers.

Codestreams and test files can be found on the JPEG GitLab repository.

"Motivated by the consumers’ concerns of manipulated contents, the JPEG Committee has taken concrete steps to define a new standard that provides interoperable solutions for a secure and reliable annotation of media assets creation and modifications” 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 96th JPEG Meeting was held online from 25 to 29 July 2022. The next 98th JPEG Meeting will be held in Sydney, Australia from 14 to 20 January 2023.

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 informed about JPEG activities, please subscribe to the jpeg- mailing lists.

Future JPEG meetings are planned as follows:

  • No 98, will be in Sydney, Australia from 14-20 January 2023

A zip package containing the official JPEG logo and logos of all JPEG standards can be downloaded here.