The 92nd MPEG meeting is hosted by the Institut für Informationsverarbeitung of Leibniz Universität Hannover.

• The first JCT meeting will be held on 15-23 April, 2010
• AhGs will meet on 18 April, 2010
• The 92nd MPEG meeting will be held on 19-23 April, 2010

All meetings will take place in the art’otel dresden. The official web site is accessible now at http://mpeg.tnt.uni-hannover.de/.

Permanent Link: The 92nd MPEG meeting in Dresden, Germany

The China National Body (CNNB) first proposed to hold the 100th MPEG meeting in Suzhou, China on April 16-20, 2012 during this Kyoto MPEG meeting. This proposal has a good chance of being approved by MPEG plenary if there are no other competitors. Good luck to CNNB!

The plan of next eight MPEG meetings  (from 92nd to 99th) is listed as follows:

Keep updating on the plan of MPEG meetings!

Permanent Link: The 100th MPEG meeting held in Suzhou, China on April 16-20, 2012?

During the 39th VCEG and 91st MPEG meeting held in Kyoto, Japan on January 17-22, 2010, the call for proposals (CfP) on video compression technology (H.NGVC/HVC) will be finally issued jointly by ITU-T SG16 Q.6 (VCEG) and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) on January 22, 2010. A Joint Collaborative Team (JCT) on Video Coding Standard Development will also be established accordingly between VCEG and MPEG.
Some minor modifications to draft CfP issued in November 2009 are made. The modifications involve the timeline, test conditions and test fees, etc., as follows:

• Timeline

The timeline of the Call for Proposals is changed:
2010/01/22:                 Final Call for Proposals.
2010/01/22:                 Formal registration period opens [1].
2010/02/15:                 Formal registration period ends.
2010/02/22:                 Coded test material shall be available at the test site [2].
2010/03/02:                 Subjective assessment starts.
2010/04/12:                 Registration of do[......]

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Permanent Link: Final Call for Proposals on H.NGVC/HVC Issued Jointly by VCEG and MPEG

The 91st MPEG Meeting, hosted by Information Processing Society of Japan/ Information Technology Standards Commission of Japan (IPSJ/ITSCJ) , will be held at Kyoto Research Park on 18-22 January 2010, in Kyoto, Japan.

The official web site is accessible now at http://mpeg.espalier.co.jp/, and the registration information is listed as follows:
Delegates are requested to contribute a Facilities fee of JPY 40,000 (about US$400) before or on 2009-12-05.
Delegates who register after 2009-12-05 will be charged JPY 50,000.
Mandatory document handling fee (for the WG 11 meeting website management): JPY 2,000.

Permanent Link: The 91st MPEG meeting in Kyoto, Japan

In the beginning plenary of 90th MPEG meeting on Oct. 26, several national bodies, such as USNB, FRNB, SGNB, and CNNB, recommended to delay the submission date of responses to the Call for Proposal (CfP) on HVC from December 2009 to March 2010. The major concerns from the national bodies are:

• the need of sufficient time to finalize the establishment of collaborative team with VCEG and only then issue a joint CfP;
• the need of sufficient time to determine the cost of the subjective evaluation tests after the CfP is finalized;
• the need of sufficient time to refine the CfP test conditions/materials and only then generate the proposed bitstreams;
• the need of sufficient time to define the complexity evaluation criterion in an objective method for quantitative analysis,
• the need of sufficient time to perform the subjective evaluation tests but currently planned in the year-end holidays period.

This recommendation aroused controversy between the delegates of national bodies and the convenor,[......]

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Permanent Link: Delay the Submission of Responses to CfP on HVC, or not?

As mentioned in the previous post, MPEG/VCEG has launched a new video coding standardization project, which is tentatively named as High-performance Video Coding (HVC). The formal name is still under discussion. A short list of candidates most supported in MPEG-newvid mailing list are summarized by Ken McCann from ZetaCast,

• HVC – High-efficiency Video Coding (Note: not High-performance Video Coding? I prefer the latter)
• EPVC – Enhanced Performance Video Coding
• HEVC – High Efficiency Video Coding
• HCEV – High Coding Efficiency Video

An online poll was set up at Doodle [Poll: Name of new MPEG/VCEG Standard].  Your opinion is very important. Please vote with your real name to keep the process transparent.

Permanent Link: Vote for your favorite name of next generation video coding standard

The intra prediction in H.264/AVC is a type of spatial domain directional prediction, which means different intra prediction modes represent different prediction directions, such as horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. An intra-coded MB can be partitioned into 4×4, 8×8, or 16×16 intra prediction blocks. The 4×4 and 8×8 intra prediction blocks have nine prediction directions, respectively, and the 16×16 block has four. Hence, totally 22 (9+9+4) intra prediction modes are used in H.264/AVC. The residue usually has high energy along the direction of prediction, as edges are more difficult to be predicted than smooth areas.
Mode-dependent directional transform (MDDT) was proposed to compact the residue produced by intra prediction. It consists of a series of pre-defined separable transforms; each transform is efficient in compacting energy along one of the prediction directions, thus favoring one of the intra modes. The type of MDDT is coupled with the selected[......]

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Permanent Link: Mode-Dependent Directional Transform (MDDT) in JM/KTA

3. Adaptive Loop Filter
As far as adaptive loop filter (ALF) is concerned, there are three types of ALF: frame-based, block-based and quadtree-based ALFs. All of them are based on wiener filter, but with different filtering control basis. In frame-based ALF [VCEG-C437/AI14, C402], only one picture level flag is used to signal the decision of filtering or non-filtering.
Although wiener filter can restore the reconstructed picture to the original picture globally, there are degraded pixels locally. Since the degraded area reduce the filtering efficiency, if these areas are not filtered, the capabilities of picture restoration and loop filtering are improved. Therefore, block-based ALF [VCEG-AI18/AJ13] use explicit flags for filtering on-off on block by block basis, while quadtree-based ALF [VCEG-C181/AK22] introduces a quadtree data structure to carry out the variable-size block filtering.

3.1 Block-based Adaptive Loop Filter
Block-based ALF is an improvement of frame-based ALF. Figure [......]

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Permanent Link: Adaptive Post/Loop Filters in JM/KTA – Part 2