Video Coding Experts Group

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Video Coding Experts Group
AbbreviationVCEG
PredecessorSpecialists Group on Coding for Visual Telephony
Formation1984
Type Standards organization
PurposeCoding of video, images, audio, biomedical waveforms, and other signals
Region served
Worldwide
Rapporteur
 Gary Sullivan
Associate Rapporteur
 Thomas Wiegand
Associate Rapporteur
Yan Ye
Parent organization
 ITU-T Study Group 16
Website www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/studygroups/2022-2024/16/video/Pages/vceg.aspx

The Video Coding Experts Group or Visual Coding Experts Group (VCEG, also known as Question 6) is a working group of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) concerned with standards for compression coding of video, images, audio signals, biomedical waveforms, and other signals. It is responsible for standardization of the "H.26x" line of video coding standards, the "T.8xx" line of image coding standards, and related technologies.

Contents

Administratively, VCEG is the informal name of Question 6 (Visual, audio and signal coding) of Working Party 3 (Audiovisual technologies and intelligent immersive applications) of ITU-T Study Group 16 (Multimedia and related digital technologies). Its abbreviated title is ITU-T Q.6/SG16, or more simply, ITU-T Q6/16.

The goal of VCEG is to produce ITU-T Recommendations (international standards) for video coding and image coding methods appropriate for conversational (e.g. videoconferencing and video telephony) and non-conversational (e.g., streaming, broadcast, file download, media storage/playback, or digital cinema) audio/visual services. This mandate concerns the maintenance and extension of existing video coding recommendations, and laying the ground for new recommendations using advanced techniques to significantly improve the trade-offs between bit rate, quality, delay, and algorithm complexity. Video coding standards are desired with sufficient flexibility to accommodate a diverse number of transport types (Internet, LAN, Mobile, ISDN, GSTN, H.222.0, NGN, etc.).

In 2023, VCEG began working toward standardization of coding technology for biomedical signals and other waveform signals.

Question 6 is part of Study Group 16, which is responsible for standards relating to multimedia service capabilities, and application capabilities (including those supported for next-generation networking). This encompasses multimedia terminals, systems (e.g., network signal processing equipment, multipoint conference units, gateways, gatekeepers, modems, and facsimile), protocols and signal processing (media coding).

History

VCEG was preceded in the ITU-T (which was called the CCITT at the time) by the "Specialists Group on Coding for Visual Telephony" chaired by Sakae Okubo (NTT) which developed H.261. The first meeting of this group was held December 11–14, 1984, in Tokyo, Japan. Okubo was also the ITU-T coordinator for developing the H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 video coding standard and the requirements chairman in MPEG for the MPEG-2 set of standards. [1]

The first digital video coding standard was H.120, created by the CCITT (now ITU-T) in 1984. [2] H.120 was not usable in practice, as its performance was too poor. [2] H.120 was based on differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM), which had relatively inefficient compression. During the late 1980s, a number of companies began experimenting with the much more efficient motion-compensated block transform hybrid compression model for video coding. [3]

In 1994, Richard Shaphorst (Delta Information Systems) took over new video coding development in ITU-T with the launch of the project for developing H.324. Schaphorst appointed Karel Rijkse (KPN Research) to chair the development of the H.263 video coding standard as part of that project. In 1996, Schaphorst then appointed Gary Sullivan (PictureTel, 1999–2022 Microsoft, since 2023 Dolby) to launch the subsequent "H.263+" enhancement project, which was completed in 1998. In 1998, Sullivan was made rapporteur (chairman) of the question (group) for video coding in the ITU-T that is now called VCEG. After the H.263+ project, the group then completed an "H.263++" effort, produced H.263 Appendix III and H.263 Annex X, and launched the "H.26L" project with a call for proposals issued in January 1998 and a first draft design adopted in August 1999. In 2000, Thomas Wiegand (Fraunhofer HHI) was appointed as an associated rapporteur (vice-chairman) of VCEG. Sullivan and Wiegand led the H.26L project as it progressed to eventually become the H.264 standard after formation of a Joint Video Team (JVT) with MPEG in 2001, completing the first version of the standard in 2003. (In MPEG, the H.264 standard is known as MPEG-4 part 10.) After 2003, VCEG and the JVT developed several substantial extensions of H.264, produced H.271, [4] and conducted exploration work toward the creation of a future new standard with better compression capability. Wiegand has remained an associated rapporteur of VCEG since that time.

In July 2006, the video coding work of the ITU-T led by VCEG was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history. [5] The image coding work that is now in the domain of VCEG was also highly ranked in the voting, placing third overall. [6]

In January 2010, the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) was created as a group of video coding experts from ITU-T Study Group 16 (VCEG) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 (MPEG) to develop a new generation video coding standard now known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, H.265, ISO/IEC 23008-2 and MPEG-H Part 2). [7]

In July 2014, Jill Boyce (then of Vidyo, later Intel) was appointed as an additional associated rapporteur for VCEG. Boyce remained in that role for seven years, stepping down as associated rapporteur in June 2021.

In May 2015 the ITU celebrated its 150-year anniversary, and the work of VCEG was one of the five areas of standardization to be recognized by an "ITU 150 Award" as one of the most influential topics of ITU work. [8]

VCEG and MPEG created another partnership called the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) in October 2015, later renaming it as the Joint Video Experts Team, which developed the Versatile Video Coding (VVC, H.266, ISO/IEC 23090-3 and MPEG-I Part 3) standard, completing the first version of the standard in July 2020.

In January 2022, Yan Ye (of Alibaba) was appointed as an associate rapporteur for VCEG.

In 2023, VCEG began considering standardization of coding technology for biomedical and other waveform signals in collaboration with DICOM Working Group 32 (Neurophysiology data). [9]

Video coding standards

The organization now known as VCEG has standardized (and is responsible for the maintenance of) the following video compression formats:

Image coding standards

Starting in late 2006, VCEG has also been responsible for the ITU-T work on still image coding standards including the following:

VCEG works on most of these image coding standards jointly with ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1 (the Joint Photographic Experts Group/Joint Bi-level Image experts Group).

See also

Related Research Articles

H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bit-rate compressed format for videotelephony. It was standardized by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) in a project ending in 1995/1996. It is a member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moving Picture Experts Group</span> Alliance of working groups to set standards for multimedia coding

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and file formats for various applications. Together with JPEG, MPEG is organized under ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 – Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Video codec</span> Digital video processing

A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, codec is a portmanteau of encoder and decoder, while a device that only compresses is typically called an encoder, and one that only decompresses is a decoder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JPEG 2000</span> Image compression standard and coding system

JPEG 2000 (JP2) is an image compression standard and coding system. It was developed from 1997 to 2000 by a Joint Photographic Experts Group committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi, with the intention of superseding their original JPEG standard, which is based on a discrete cosine transform (DCT), with a newly designed, wavelet-based method. The standardized filename extension is .jp2 for ISO/IEC 15444-1 conforming files and .jpx for the extended part-2 specifications, published as ISO/IEC 15444-2. The registered MIME types are defined in RFC 3745. For ISO/IEC 15444-1 it is image/jp2.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joint Photographic Experts Group</span> Non-profit organisation

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is the joint committee between ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 and ITU-T Study Group 16 that created and maintains the JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, JPEG XT, JPEG XS, JPEG XL, and related digital image standards. It also has the responsibility for maintenance of the JBIG and JBIG2 standards that were developed by the former Joint Bi-level Image Experts Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Advanced Video Coding</span> Most widely used standard for video compression

Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content, used by 91% of video industry developers as of September 2019. It supports a maximum resolution of 8K UHD.

The Joint Bi-level Image Experts Group (JBIG) was a group of experts nominated by national standards bodies and major companies to work to produce standards for bi-level image coding. The "joint" refers to its status as a committee working on both ISO and ITU-T standards. It was one of two sub-groups of ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 29, Working Group 1, whose official title is Coding of still pictures.

MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosine transform (DCT), similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 Part 2 and H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2.

The macroblock is a processing unit in image and video compression formats based on linear block transforms, typically the discrete cosine transform (DCT). A macroblock typically consists of 16×16 samples, and is further subdivided into transform blocks, and may be further subdivided into prediction blocks. Formats which are based on macroblocks include JPEG, where they are called MCU blocks, H.261, MPEG-1 Part 2, H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2, H.263, MPEG-4 Part 2, and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. In H.265/HEVC, the macroblock as a basic processing unit has been replaced by the coding tree unit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Wiegand</span> German electrical engineer (born 1970)

Thomas Wiegand is a German electrical engineer who substantially contributed to the creation of the H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC video coding standards. For H.264/AVC, Wiegand was one of the chairmen of the Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization committee that created the standard and was the chief editor of the standard itself. He was also a very active technical contributor to the H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC video coding standards. Wiegand also holds a chairmanship position in the ITU-T VCEG of ITU-T Study Group 16 and previously in ISO/IEC MPEG standardization organizations. In July 2006, video coding work of the ITU-T was jointly led by Gary J. Sullivan and Wiegand for the preceding six years. It was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history. Since 2018, Wiegand has served as chair of the ITU/WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health (FG-AI4H). Since 2014, Thomson Reuters named Wiegand in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” as one of the most cited researchers in his field.

Gary Joseph Sullivan is an American electrical engineer who led the development of the AVC, HEVC, and VVC video coding standards and created the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API/DDI video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system. He is currently Director of Video Research and Standards at Dolby Laboratories and is the chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 and of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG).

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding. In comparison to AVC, HEVC offers from 25% to 50% better data compression at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate. It supports resolutions up to 8192×4320, including 8K UHD, and unlike the primarily 8-bit AVC, HEVC's higher fidelity Main 10 profile has been incorporated into nearly all supporting hardware.

The ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) is a container file format that defines a general structure for files that contain time-based multimedia data such as video and audio. It is standardized in ISO/IEC 14496-12, a.k.a. MPEG-4 Part 12, and was formerly also published as ISO/IEC 15444-12, a.k.a. JPEG 2000 Part 12.

A video coding format is a content representation format of digital video content, such as in a data file or bitstream. It typically uses a standardized video compression algorithm, most commonly based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding and motion compensation. A specific software, firmware, or hardware implementation capable of compression or decompression in a specific video coding format is called a video codec.

MPEG-H is a group of international standards under development by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It has various "parts" – each of which can be considered a separate standard. These include a media transport protocol standard, a video compression standard, an audio compression standard, a digital file format container standard, three reference software packages, three conformance testing standards, and related technologies and technical reports. The group of standards is formally known as ISO/IEC 23008 – High efficiency coding and media delivery in heterogeneous environments. Development of the standards began around 2010, and the first fully approved standard in the group was published in 2013. Most of the standards in the group have been revised or amended several times to add additional extended features since their first edition.

Motion JPEG 2000 is a file format for motion sequences of JPEG 2000 images and associated audio, based on the MP4 and QuickTime format. Filename extensions for Motion JPEG 2000 video files are .mj2 and .mjp2, as defined in RFC 3745.

High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) is a container format for storing individual digital images and image sequences. The standard covers multimedia files that can also include other media streams, such as timed text, audio and video.

Versatile Video Coding (VVC), also known as H.266, ISO/IEC 23090-3, and MPEG-I Part 3, is a video compression standard finalized on 6 July 2020, by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), a joint video expert team of the VCEG working group of ITU-T Study Group 16 and the MPEG working group of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29. It is the successor to High Efficiency Video Coding. It was developed with two primary goals – improved compression performance and support for a very broad range of applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ITU-T Study Group 16</span> Standardization body focused on multimedia standards, such as video coding standards (e.g. MP4)

The ITU-T Study Group 16 (SG16) is a statutory group of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) concerned with multimedia coding, systems and applications, such as video coding standards. It is responsible for standardization of the "H.26x" line of video coding standards, the "T.8xx" line of image coding standards, and related technologies, as well as various collaborations with the World Health Organization, including on safe listing (H.870) accessibility of e-health (F.780.2), it is also the parent body of VCEG and various Focus Groups, such as the ITU-WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health and its AI for Health Framework.

References

  1. ↑ "Sakae Okubo". ITU . Retrieved 2017-01-27.
  2. 1 2 "The History of Video File Formats Infographic". RealNetworks . 22 April 2012. Retrieved 5 August 2019.
  3. ↑ Ghanbari, Mohammed (2003). Standard Codecs: Image Compression to Advanced Video Coding. Institution of Engineering and Technology. pp. 1–2. ISBN   9780852967102.
  4. ↑ Recommendation ITU-T H.271
  5. ↑ ITU (2006-10-02). "Video Coding Work Voted Most Influential". Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. Retrieved 2015-06-18.
  6. ↑ ITU (2006-07-20). "Fifty Years of Excellence in Telecommunication/ICT Standards" . Retrieved 2015-06-18.
  7. ↑ ITU-T. "Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding - JCT-VC" . Retrieved 2010-03-07.
  8. ↑ ITU (2015-05-17). "17 May: ITU's 150th Anniversary Celebrations" . Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  9. ↑ Pfaff, Jonathan; Halford, Jonathan (20 October 2023). "Call for evidence on the coding of biomedical waveform data" (PDF). ITU . Retrieved 27 April 2024.
  10. ↑ "New video codec to ease pressure on global networks". ITU. 2013-01-25. Retrieved 2013-01-25.
  11. ↑ Todd Spangler (2013-01-25). "ITU OKs Next-Generation Video Codec Standard". Multichannel News. Archived from the original on 2013-12-12. Retrieved 2013-01-25.
  12. ↑ "ITU-T Work Programme". ITU. Retrieved 2013-01-27.
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