Research, standards and thoughts for the digital world

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MPAI MPEG ISO

With 5 standards approved, MPAI enters a new phase

Geneva, Switzerland – 26 January 2022. Today the Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial Intelligence (MPAI) standards developing organisation has concluded its 16th General Assembly, the first of 2022, approving its 2022 work program. The work program includes the development of reference software, conformance testing and performance assessment for 2 application standards (Context-based Audio Enhancement and Multimodal Conversation), reference software, conformance assessment for 1 infrastructure standard (AI Framework), and the establishment of the MPAI Store, a non-profit foundation…

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Revisiting the “patents in standards” issue

Four years ago these days, I was writing a post on my blog titled A crisis, the causes and a solution. The subject was the issue of patents in MPEG standards. It was a time when I still had reasons to believe that something could be done about that issue. In this post I want to revisit the issue because that post and others following it are still among the most read posts on my blog. This means that people…

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Digital humans and MPAI

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“Digital human”  has recently become a trendy expression and different meanings can be attached to it. MPAI says that it is “a digital object able to receive text/audio/video/commands (“Information”) and generate Information that is congruent with the received Information”. MPAI has been developing several standards for “digital humans” and plans on extending them and developing more. Let’s have an overview. In Conversation with Emotion a digital human perceives text or speech from and video of a human. It then generates…

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What MPAI does in a week

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The year 2021 was very productive for MPAI. In January it started with a Call for Technologies on AI Framework and ended in December with 5standards approved and 7 projects in the pipeline. How was that possible? Simple: intense collaborative work. OK, but exactly how? So far MPAI has not held physical meetings. MPAI does all current work online in 1, 2 or 3 one-hour sessions a day in the 13-18 UTC time frame. Purpose of this post is to…

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A better experience for audioconference users

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Today video/audio conference is a virtual space where many of us spend their working hours. Still the experience of a conference suffer from many deficiencies depending on the fact that the way audio is captured and conveyed to the virtual space is inadequate. Our brains can separate the voice of competing speakers, and remove the effect of non-ideal acoustical properties of the physical space and/or the background noise in the same in the same physical environment. However, when the acoustic…

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Restoring damaged speech

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The third context of the Context-based Audio Enhancement (MPAI-CAE) standard is restoration of damaged speech. Unlike Audio Recording Preservation where audio has clear provenance – the magnetic tape of an open reel whose analogue audio has been digitised – Speech Restoration System does not make a reference to anything analogue. It assumes that there is a file containing digital speech. For whatever reason, it may be so that portions of the file are damaged – maybe the physical medium from…

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