Communication makes us humans different. Media make communication between humans effective and enjoyable. Standards make media communication possible. Thirty-two years ago, the MPEG vision was forming: make global standards available to allow industry to provide devices and services for the then emerging digital media so that humans could communicate seamlessly. For thirty-two years the MPEG standards group has lived up to the MPEG vision: MPEG standards are behind the relentless growth of many industries – some of them created by…

It is a now a few months since I last talked about the standards being developed  by MPEG. As the group dynamics is fast, I think it is time to make an update about the main areas of standardisation: Video, Audio, Point Clouds, Fonts, Neural Networks, Genomic data, Scene description, Transport, File Format and API. You will also find a few words on three exploration that MPEG is making Video Coding for Machines MPEG-21 contracts to smart contracts Machine tool data.…

Introduction Having become the enabler of a market of devices and services worth 1.5 T$ p.a., MPEG is a big achievement, but is that a climax or the starting point aiming at new highs? This is a natural question to ask for a group that calls itself “MPEG Future”. The future is still to be written and the success of MPEG will largely depend on the ability of those who attempt to write it. This article will try and analyse…

If MPEG were a typical company, the answer to this question would be simple. Persons in charge of different levels of the organisation “decide”. But MPEG is not a company and there is no chain of command where A tells B to do C or else. Decisions are made, but how? As an autocracy, an oligarchy or a democracy? To answer these questions, let’s first see how the work in MPEG is organised. The convenor chairs the 3 plenary sessions.…

The question looks innocent enough. A video is a sequence of images (called frames) captured and eventually displayed at a given frequency. However, by stopping at a specific frame of the sequence, a single video frame, i.e. an image, is obtained. If we talk of a sequence of video frames, that would always be true. It would also be true if an image compression algorithm (an “intra-frame” coding system) is applied to each individual frame. Such coding system may not…