Document WG1N100618
JPEG Trust reaches Committee Draft stage at the 101st JPEG meeting
The 101st JPEG meeting was held online, from the 30th of October to the 3rd of November 2023. At this meeting, JPEG Trust became a Committee Draft. JPEG AI also reached Committee Draft status, reflecting the large number of core experiments held after the 100th JPEG meeting. In addition, JPEG analyzed the responses to its Calls for Proposals for JPEG DNA.
The following sections summarize the main highlights of the 101st JPEG meeting.
JPEG Trust
The 101st meeting marked an important milestone for JPEG Trust project with its Committee Draft (CD) for Part 1 “Core Foundation” (21617-1) of the standard approved for consultation. It is expected that a Draft International Standard (DIS) of the Core Foundation will be approved at the 102nd JPEG meeting in January 2024, which will be another important milestone. This rapid schedule is necessitated by the speed at which fake media and misinformation are proliferating especially in respect of generative AI.
Aligned with JPEG Trust, the NFT Call for Proposals (CfP) has yielded two expressions of interest to date, and submission of proposals is still open till the 15th of January 2024.
Additionally, the Use Cases and Requirements document for JPEG Fake Media (the JPEG Fake Media exploration preceded the initiation of the JPEG Trust international standard) was updated to reflect the change to JPEG Trust as well as incorporate additional use cases that have arisen since the previous JPEG meeting, namely in respect of composited images. This document is publicly available on the JPEG website.
JPEG AI
At the 101st meeting, the JPEG Committee issued a request for re-establishing the JPEG AI (6048-1) project, along with a Committee Draft (CD) of its version 1. A new JPEG AI timeline has also been approved and is now publicly available, where a Draft International Standard (DIS) of the Core Coding Engine of JPEG AI version 1 is foreseen at the 103rd JPEG meeting (April 2024), a rather important milestone for JPEG AI. The JPEG Committee also established that JPEG AI version 2 will address requirements not yet fulfilled (especially regarding machine consumption tasks) but also significant improvements on requirements already addressed in version 1, e.g. compression efficiency. JPEG AI version 2 will issue the final Call for Proposals in January 2025 and the presentation and evaluation of JPEG AI version 2 proposals will occur in July 2025. During 2023, the JPEG AI Verification Model (VM) has evolved from a complex system (800kMAC/pxl) to two acceptable complexity-efficiency operation points, providing 11% compression efficiency gains at 20 kMAC/pxl and 25% compression efficiency gains at 200 kMAC/pxl. The decoder for the lower-end operating point has now been implemented on mobile devices and demonstrated during the 100th and 101st JPEG meetings. A presentation with the JPEG AI architecture, networks, and tools is now publicly available. To avoid project delays in the future, the promising input contributions from the 101st meeting will be combined in JPEG AI Core Experiment 6.1 (CE6.1) to study interaction and resolve potential issues during the next meeting cycle. After this integration, a model will be trained and cross-checked to be approved for release (JPEG AI VM5 release candidate) along with the study DIS text. Among promising technologies included in CE6.1 are high quality and variable rate improvements, with a smaller number of models (from 5 to 4), a multi-branch decoder that allows up to three reconstructions with different levels of quality from the same latent representation, but with synthesis transform networks with different complexity along with several post-filter and arithmetic coder simplifications.
JPEG Pleno Learning-based Point Cloud coding
The JPEG Pleno Learning-based Point Cloud coding activity progressed at the 101st meeting with a major investigation into point cloud quality metrics. The JPEG Committee decided to continue this investigation into point cloud quality metrics as well as explore possible advancements to the VM in the areas of parameter tuning and support for residual lossless coding. The JPEG Committee is targeting a release of the Committee Draft of Part 6 of the JPEG Pleno standard relating to Learning-based point cloud coding at the 102nd JPEG meeting in San Francisco, USA in January 2024.
JPEG Pleno Light Field
The JPEG Committee has been creating several standards to provision the dynamic demands of the market, with its royalty-free patent licensing commitments. A light field coding standard has recently been developed, and JPEG Pleno is constantly exploring novel light field coding architectures.
The JPEG Committee is also preparing standardization activities – among others – in the domains of objective and subjective quality assessment for light fields, improved light field coding modes, and learning-based light field coding.
A Light Field Industry Workshop takes place on November 22nd, 2023, aiming at providing a forum for industrial actors to exchange information on their needs and expectations with respect to standardization activities in this domain.
JPEG AIC
During the 101st JPEG meeting, the AIC activity continued its efforts on the evaluation of the contributions received in April 2023 in response to the Call for Contributions on Subjective Image Quality Assessment. Notably, the activity is currently investigating three different subjective image quality assessment methodologies. The results of the newly established Core Experiments will be considered during the design of the AIC-3 standard, which has been carried out in a collaborative way since its beginning.
The AIC activity also initiated the discussion on Part 4 of the standard on Objective Image Quality Metrics (AIC-4) by refining the Use Cases and Requirements document. During the 102nd JPEG meeting in January 2024, the activity is planning to work on the Draft Call for Proposals on Objective Image Quality Assessment.
JPEG XE
The JPEG Committee continued its activity on Event-based Vision. This activity revolves around a new and emerging image modality created by event-based visual sensors. JPEG XE aims at the 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. For better dissemination and raising external interest, a workshop around Event-based Vision was organized and took place on Oct 24th, 2023. The workshop triggered the attention of various stakeholders in the field of Event-based Vision, who will start contributing to JPEG XE. The workshop proceedings are available on jpeg.org. In addition, the JPEG Committee created a minor revision for the Use cases and Requirements as v1.0, adding an extra use case on scientific and engineering measurements. Finally, a first draft of the Common Test Conditions for JPEG XE was produced, along with the first Exploration Experiments to start practical experiments in the coming 3-month period until the next JPEG meeting. The public Ad-hoc Group on Event-based Vision was re-established to continue the work towards the next 102nd JPEG meeting in January of 2024. To stay informed about the activities please join the Event-based Vision Ad-hoc Group mailing list.
JPEG DNA
As a result of the Call for Proposals issued by the JPEG Committee for contributions to JPEG DNA standard, 5 proposals were submitted under three distinct codecs by three organizations. Two codecs were submitted to both coding and transcoding categories, and one was submitted to the coding category only. All proposals showed improved compression efficiency when compared to three selected anchors by the JPEG Committee. After a rigorous analysis of the proposals and their cross checking by independent parties, it was decided to create a first Verification Model (VM) based on V- DNA, the best performing proposal. In addition, a number of core experiments were designed to improve the JPEG DNA VM with elements from other proposals submitted by quantifying their added value when integrated in the VM.
JPEG XS
The JPEG Committee continued its work on JPEG XS 3rd edition. 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. The Final Draft International Standard for Part 1 of the standard – Core coding tools – was produced at this meeting. With this FDIS version, all technical features are now fixed and completed. Part 2 – Profiles and buffer models – and Part 3 – Transport and container formats – of the standard are still in DIS ballot, and ballot results will only be known by the end of January 2024. The JPEG Committee is now working on Part 4 – Conformance testing, to provide the necessary test streams of the 3rd edition for potential implementors. A first Working Draft for Part 4 was issued. Completion of the JPEG XS 3rd edition is scheduled for April 2024 (Parts 1, 2, and 3) and Parts 4 and 5 will follow shortly after that. Finally, the new Use cases and Requirements for JPEG XS document was created containing a new use case to use JPEG XS for transport of 4K/8K video over 5G mobile networks. It is expected that the new use case can already be covered by the 3rd edition, meaning that no further updates to the standard would be needed. However, more investigations and experimentations will be conducted on this subject.
JPEG XL
The second editions of JPEG XL Part 1 (Core coding system) and Part 2 (File format) have proceeded to the FDIS stage, and the second edition of JPEG XL Part 3 (Conformance testing) has proceeded to the CD stage. These second editions provide clarifications, corrections and editorial improvements that will facilitate independent implementations. At the same time, the development of hardware implementation solutions continues.
"The release of the first Committee Draft of JPEG Trust is a strong signal that the JPEG Committee is reacting with a timely response to demands for solutions that inform users when digital media assets are created or modified, in particular through Generative AI, hence contributing to bringing back trust into media-centric ecosystems.” 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 100th JPEG Meeting was held in Covilha, Portugal from 15 to 21 July 2023. The next 102nd JPEG Meeting will be in San Francisco, CA, USA, from 21 to 26 January 2024.
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. 102 will be in San Francisco, CA, USA, from 21 to 26 January 2024
- No. 103 will be online from 8–12 April 2024
A zip package containing the official JPEG logo and logos of all JPEG standards can be downloaded here.