Document WG1N100539
JPEG AI reaches Committee Draft stage at the 100th JPEG meeting
The 100th JPEG meeting was held in Covilhã, Portugal, from the 17th to 21st July 2023. At this meeting, in addition to its usual standardization activities, the JPEG Committee organized a celebration on the occasion of its 100th meeting. This face-to-face meeting, the second after the pandemic, had a record amount of face-to-face participation, with more than 70 experts attending the meeting in person.
Several activities reached important milestones. JPEG AI became a Committee Draft after intensive meeting sessions with detailed analysis of the core experiment results and multiple evaluations of the considered technologies. JPEG NFT issued a call for proposals, and the first JPEG XE use cases and requirements document was also issued publicly. Furthermore, JPEG Trust made major steps towards its standardization.
The following sections summarize the main highlights of the 100th JPEG meeting.
JPEG Celebrates its 100th meeting
The JPEG Committee organized a celebration of its 100th meeting. A ceremony took place on July 19, 2023 to mark this important milestone. The JPEG Convenor initiated the ceremony, followed by a speech from Prof. Carlos Salema, founder and former chair of the Instituto de Telecomunicações and current vice president of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, and a welcome note from Prof. Silvia Socorro, vice-rector for research at the University of Beira Interior. Personalities from standardization organizations ISO, IEC and ITU, as well as the Portuguese government, sent welcome addresses in form of recorded videos. Furthermore, a collection of short video addresses from past and current JPEG experts was collected and presented during the ceremony. The celebration was preceded by a workshop on “Media Authenticity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. Further information on the workshop and its proceedings are accessible on jpeg.org. A social event followed the celebration ceremony.
JPEG AI
The JPEG AI (ISO/IEC 6048) learning-based image coding system has completed the Committee Draft of the standard. The current JPEG AI Verification Model (VM) has two operation points, called base and high which include several tools which can be enabled or disabled, without re-training the neural network models. The base operation point is a subset of design elements of the high operation point. The lowest configuration (base operating point without tools) provides 8% rate savings over the VVC Intra anchor with twice faster decoding and 250 times faster encoder run time on CPU. In the most powerful configuration, the current VM achieves a 29% compression gain over the VVC Intra anchor.
The performance of the JPEG AI VM 3 was presented and discussed during the 100th JPEG meeting. The findings of the 15 core experiments created during the previous 99th JPEG meeting, as well as other input contributions, were discussed and investigated. This effort resulted in the reorganization of many syntactic parts with the goal of their simplification, as well as the use of several neural networks and tools, namely some design simplifications and post filtering improvements. Furthermore, coding efficiency was increased at high quality up to visually lossless, and region-of-interest quality enhancement functionality, as well as bit-exact repeatability, were added among other enhancements. The attention mechanism for the high operation point is the most significant change, as it considerably decreases decoder complexity. The entropy decoding neural network structure is now identical for the high and base operation points. The defined analysis and synthesis transforms enable efficient coding from high quality to near visually lossless and the chroma quality has been improved with the use of novel enhancement filtering technologies.
JPEG Pleno Learning-based Point Cloud coding
The JPEG Pleno Point Cloud activity progressed at the 100th meeting with a major improvement to its Verification Model (VM) incorporating a sparse convolutional framework providing improved quality with a more efficient computational model. In addition, an exciting new application was demonstrated showing the ability of the JPEG VM to support point cloud classification. The 100th JPEG Meeting also saw the release of a new point cloud test set to better support this activity. Prior to the 101st JPEG meeting in October 2023, JPEG experts will investigate possible advancements to the VM in the areas of attention models, voxel pruning within sparse tensor convolution, and support for residual lossless coding. In addition, a major Exploration Study will be conducted to explore the latest point cloud quality metrics.
JPEG Trust
The JPEG Committee is expediting the development of the first part, the “Core Foundation”, of its new international standard: JPEG Trust. This standard defines a framework for establishing trust in media, and addresses aspects of authenticity and provenance through secure and reliable annotation of media assets throughout their life cycle. JPEG Trust is being built on its 2022 Call for Proposals, whose responses form the basis of the framework under development.
The new standard is expected to be published in 2024. To stay updated on JPEG Trust, please regularly check the JPEG website for the latest information and/or subscribe to the JPEG Trust mailing list.
JPEG NFT
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are an exciting new way to create and trade media assets, and have seen an increasing interest from global markets. NFTs promise to impact the trading of artworks, collectible media assets, micro-licensing, gaming, ticketing and more. At the same time, concerns about interoperability between platforms, intellectual property rights, and fair dealing must be addressed.
JPEG is pleased to announce a Final Call for Proposals on JPEG NFT to address these challenges. The Final Call for Proposals on JPEG NFT and the associated Use Cases and Requirements for JPEG NFT document can be downloaded from the jpeg.org website. JPEG invites interested parties to register their proposals by 2023-10-23. The final deadline for submission of full proposals is 2024-01-15.
JPEG AIC
During the 100th JPEG meeting, the AIC activity continued its efforts on the Core Experiments, which aim at collecting fundamental information on the performance of the contributions received in April 2023 in response to a Call for Contributions on Subjective Image Quality Assessment. These results will be considered during the design of the AIC-3 standard, which has been carried out in a collaborative way since its beginning. The activity also initiated the definition of a Working Draft for AIC-3.
Other activities are also planned to initiate the work on a Draft Call for Proposals on Objective Image Quality Metrics (AIC-4) during the 101st JPEG meeting, October 2023. The JPEG Committee invites interested parties to take part in the discussions and drafting of the Call.
JPEG XE
For the Event-based Vision exploration, called JPEG XE, the JPEG Committee finalized a first version of a Use Cases and Requirements for Event-based Vision v0.5 document. Event-based Vision revolves around a new and emerging image modality created by event-based visual sensors. JPEG XE is about creation and development of a standard to represent events in an efficient way allowing interoperability between sensing, storage, and processing, targeting machine vision and other relevant applications. Events in the context of this standard are defined as the messages that signal the result of an observation at a precise point in time, typically triggered by a detected change in the physical world. The new Use Cases and Requirements document is the first version to become publicly available and serves mainly to attract interest from external experts and other standardization organizations. Although still in a preliminary version, the JPEG committee continues to invest efforts into refining this document, so that it can serve as a solid basis for further standardization. An Ad-Hoc Group has been re-established to work on this topic until the 101st JPEG meeting in October 2023. To stay informed about the activities please join the event-based imaging Ad-hoc Group mailing list.
JPEG DNA
The JPEG Committee has been exploring coding of images in quaternary representations particularly suitable for image archival on DNA storage. The scope of JPEG DNA is to create 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.
At the 100th JPEG meeting, “Additions to the JPEG DNA Common Test Conditions version 2.0”, was produced which supplements the “JPEG DNA Common Test Conditions” by specifying a new constraint to be taken into account when coding images in quaternary representation. In addition, the detailed procedures for evaluation of the pre-registered responses to the JPEG DNA Call for Proposals were defined.
Furthermore, the next steps towards a deployed high-performance standard were discussed and defined. In particular, it was decided to request for the new work item approval once a Committee Draft stage has been reached.
The JPEG-DNA AHG has been re-established to work on the preparation of assessment and crosschecking of responses to the JPEG DNA Call for Proposals until the 101st JPEG meeting in October 2023.
JPEG XS
The JPEG Committee continued its work on the JPEG XS 3rd edition. The main goal of the 3rd edition is to reduce the bitrate for on-screen content by half while maintaining the same image quality.
Part 1 of the standard – Core coding tools – is still under Draft International Standard (DIS) ballot. For Part 2 – Profiles and buffer models – and Part 3 – Transport and container formats – the Committee Draft (CD) circulation results were processed and the DIS ballot document was created. In Part 2, three new profiles have been added to better adapt to the needs of the market. In particular, two profiles are based on the High 444.12 profile, but introduce some useful constraints on the wavelet decomposition structure and disable the column modes entirely. This makes the profiles easier to implement (with lower resource usage and fewer options to support) while remaining consistent with the way JPEG XS is already being deployed in the market today. Additionally, the two new High profiles are further constrained by explicit conformance points (like the new TDC profile) to better support market interoperability. The third new profile is called TDC MLS 444.12, and allows the achievement of mathematically lossless quality. For example, it is intended for medical applications, where a truly lossless reconstruction might be required.
Completion of the JPEG XS 3rd edition standard is scheduled for January 2024.
JPEG Systems
At the 100th meeting the JPEG Committee produced the CD text of 19566-10, the JPEG Systems Reference Software. In addition, a JPEG white paper was released that provides an overview of the entire JPEG Systems standard.
"The JPEG Committee celebrated its 100th meeting, an important milestone considering the current success of JPEG standards. This celebration was enriched with significant achievements at the meeting, notably the release of the Committee Draft of JPEG AI.” 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 99th JPEG Meeting was held online from 24 to 28 April 2023. The next 101st JPEG Meeting will be online from 30 October to 3 November 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. 101 will be online from 30 October to 3 November 2023
- No. 102 is tentatively planned for 20–26 January 2024, with meeting mode and location TBD
A zip package containing the official JPEG logo and logos of all JPEG standards can be downloaded here.