Introduction If I exchange words with taxi drivers in a city somewhere in the world, one of the questions I am usually asked is: “where are you from?”. As I do not like straight answers, I usually ask back “where do you think I am from?” It usually takes time before the driver gets the information he asked for. Then the next question is: “what is your job?”. Again, instead of giving a straight answer, I ask the question: “do…

Introduction In How does MPEG actually work? I described the MPEG process: once an idea is launched, context and objectives of the idea are identified; use cases submitted and analysed; requirements derived from use cases; and technologies proposed, validated for their effectiveness for eventual incorporation into the standard. Some people complain that MPEG standards contain too many technologies supporting “non-mainstream” use cases. Such complaints are understandable but misplaced. MPEG standards are designed to satisfy the needs of different industries and what…

Introduction In Is there a logic in MPEG standards? I described the first steps in MPEG life that look so “easy” now: MPEG-1 (1988) for interactive video and digital audio broadcasting; MPEG-2 (1991) for digital television; MPEG-4 (1993) for digital audio and video on fixed and mobile internet; MPEG-7 (1997) for audio-video-multimedia metadata; MPEG-21 (2000) for trading of digital content. Just these 5 standards, whose starting dates cover 12 years i.e. 40% of MPEG’s life time, include 86 specifications, i.e.…

Introduction Artificial intelligence has reached the attention of mass media and technologies supporting it – Neural Networks (NN) – are being deployed in several contexts affecting end users, e.g. in their smart phones. If a NN is used locally, it is possible to use existing digital representation of NNs (e.g., NNEF, ONNX). However, these format miss vital features for distributing intelligence, such as compression, scalability and incremental updates. To appreciate the need for compression let’s consider the case of adjusting…

Introduction I have seen people ask the question: MPEG makes many very successful standard but many are not widely used. Why do you make so many standards? I know they ask this question because they dare not ask this other question “Why don’t you make just the good standards?”. They do not do it because they know that the easy answer would be the famous phrase attributed to John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the…

Introduction Obviously, the electrical representation of sound information happened before the electrical representation of visual information and so did the services that used that representation to distribute sound information. The digital representation of audio, too, happened at different times than video's. In the early 1980s the Compact Disc (CD) allowed record companies to distribute digital audio for the consumer market, while the D1 digital tape, available in the late 1980’s, was for the exclusive use of professional applications such as…