[JPEG Committee Explores Using AI And Blockchain Tech For Image Compression: Digital Photography Revi
Julieann Rohde
The 84th JPEG meeting was held in Brussels, Belgium. Significant progress occurred in most of the projects, namely on the new image coding system, JPEG XL, and the standard for new imaging technologies, JPEG Pleno. In particular, JPEG XL has issued the Committee Draft, which demonstrates the progress of the JPEG XL standard as an effective solution for the future of image coding. JPEG Pleno Part 1 (Framework) and Part 2 (Light field coding) have also reached Draft International Standard status.
Moreover, exploration studies are ongoing in the domain of media blockchain and on the application of learning solutions for image coding. Both have triggered a number of activities providing new knowledge and opening new possibilities on the future use of these technologies in future JPEG standards.
JPEG Committee explores using AI and blockchain tech for image compression: Digital Photography Revi
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The JPEG XL Image Coding System (ISO/IEC 18181) has completed the Committee Draft of the standard. The new coding technique allows storage of high-quality images at one-third the size of the legacy JPEG format. Moreover, JPEG XL can losslessly transcode existing JPEG images to about 80% of their original size simplifying interoperability and accelerating wider deployment.
The JPEG XL reference software, ready for mobile and desktop deployments, will be available in Q4 2019. The current contributors have committed to releasing it publicly under a royalty-free and open source license.
A significant milestone has been reached during this meeting: the Draft International Standard (DIS) for both JPEG Pleno Part 1 (Framework) and Part 2 (Light field coding) have been completed. A draft architecture of the Reference Software (Part 4) and developments plans have been also discussed and defined.
In addition, JPEG has completed an in-depth analysis of existing point cloud coding solutions and a new version of the use-cases and requirements document has been released reflecting the role that JPEG has in the future compression of point clouds. A new set of Common Test Conditions has been released as a guideline for the testing and evaluation of point cloud coding solutions with both a best practice subjective testing protocol and a set of objective metrics.
JPEG Pleno holography activities had significant advances on the definition of use cases and requirements, and description of Common Test Conditions. New quality assessment methodologies for holographic data defined in the framework of a collaboration between JPEG and Qualinet were established. Moreover, JPEG Pleno continues collecting microscopic and tomographic holographic data.
The JPEG Committee continues to carry out exploration studies with deep learning-based image compression solutions, typically with an auto-encoder architecture. The promise that these types of codecs hold, especially in terms of coding efficiency, will be evaluated with several studies. In this meeting, a Common Test Conditions was produced, which includes a plan for subjective and objective quality assessment experiments as well as coding pipelines for anchor and learning- based codecs. Moreover, a JPEG AI dataset was proposed and discussed, and a double stimulus impairment scale experiment (side-by-side) was performed with a mix of experts and non-experts in a controlled environment.
Fake news, copyright violation, media forensics, privacy and security are emerging challenges in digital media. JPEG has determined that blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) have great potential as a technology component to address these challenges in transparent and trustable media transactions. However, blockchain and DLT need to be integrated closely with a widely adopted standard to ensure broad interoperability of protected images. JPEG calls for industry participation to help define use cases and requirements that will drive the standardization process. In order to clearly identify the impact of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies on JPEG standards, the committee has organised several workshops to interact with stakeholders in the domain.
The 4th public workshop on media blockchain was organized in Brussels on Tuesday the 16th of July 2019 during the 84th ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG1 (JPEG) Meeting. The presentations and program of the workshop are available on the JPEG website.
At the 84th meeting, IS text reviews for ISO/IEC 19566-5 JUMBF and ISO/IEC 19566-6 JPEG 360 were completed; IS publication will be forthcoming. Work began on adding functionality to JUMBF, Privacy & Security, and JPEG 360; and initial planning towards developing software implementation of these parts of JPEG Systems specification. Work also began on the new ISO/IEC 19566-7 Linked media images (JLINK) with development of a working draft.
The JPEG Committee is pleased to announce new Core Experiments and Exploration Studies on compression of raw image sensor data. The JPEG XS project aims at the standardization of a visually lossless low-latency and lightweight compression scheme that can be used as a mezzanine codec in various markets. Video transport over professional video links (SDI, IP, Ethernet), real-time video storage in and outside of cameras, memory buffers, machine vision systems, and data compression onboard of autonomous vehicles are among the targeted use cases for raw image sensor compression. This new work on raw sensor data will pave the way towards highly efficient close-to-sensor image compression workflows with JPEG XS.
The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a Working Group of ISO/IEC, the International Organisation for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission, (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1) and of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T SG16), responsible for the popular JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, JPSearch, JPEG XT and more recently, the JPEG XS, JPEG Systems, JPEG Pleno and JPEG XL families of imaging standards.
The JPEG Committee nominally meets four times a year, in different world locations. The 83rd JPEG Meeting was held on 16-22 March 2019, in Geneva, Switzerland. The next 85th JPEG Meeting will be held on 2-8 November 2019, in San Jose, CA, USA.
Yesterday smartphone maker OPPO announced an innovative 5x zoom system for smartphone cameras that uses a dual-camera in combination with a prism and periscope-style lens design. It's only 5.7mm tall, and therefore could fit into even the thinnest smartphones. Unfortunately, OPPO did not release too much technical information but there are a few prototype devices available to shoot with at the OPPO both at the Mobile World Congress. We gave the camera a quick try, and had a closer look at the sample images and embedded EXIF to find out more.
The camera app on the prototype phones is kept very simple, with the main feature being a big zoom button. One tap on the latter makes the camera jump from wide-angle to a 2x zoom factor; a second tap jumps to the full 5x magnification. There are no intermediate zoom settings. The sample images below were taken at those respective lens settings and show a well-illuminated test scene at the OPPO booth.
The camera produces 12MP images and in the EXIF data aperture at all zoom settings is reported as F2.0. At ISO 189, sensor sensitivity is the highest at the wide-angle setting. It decreases to ISO 115 at the 2x zoom setting and ISO 111 at the 5x setting. Shutter speed is reported at 1/100 sec at the wide-angle and 2x setting and 1/50 sec at the tele setting.
There is no way of knowing if the reported EXIF is accurate but, looking at the scene and considering the tele-portion of the lens construction is optically stabilized, it could well be the case that at the tele settings the light fall-off on the OPPO system is much less significant than on a conventional zoom with changing apertures. The image quality of the samples seems to support the ISO data, with the zoomed images not showing noticeably more image noise or less detail than the wide-angle shot.
Of course, we are looking at a prototype device here and the image output of an eventual production phone might look very different. Nonetheless, the sample images out of the prototype do look promising and we hope to see an OPPO device with the 5x zoom system being launched soon.
So it steps between 3 fixed focal lengths. Never mind "5x optical zoom", this thing is not even a digital zoom, it is not a zoom at all.
Typical marketing engineering - just call it by what you wish it would be and there, fixed it!
This is a simply great result for a phone. I suppose the camera makers will have to raise their bar significantly to try to prevent erosion of traditional P&S users. Good time for us consumers no doubt.
The 5x image ought to be good - it is simply the fixed focal length lens at one end of the configuration. The whole trick here is to magic up the focal lengths in between - the "zoom" bit of the equation.
It looks great to me.
I just don't get it though why they settle for 2X if the optical zoom is actually 3X?
I notice that the "5X" is better than a conventional 3X + Digital Zoom would be because it is using pixels from both sensors, which a conventional camera module couldn't.
Not sure if I like the simpler Apple and LG two focal lengths approach but will be interesting to compare to see what is actually gain in terms of zoom power and overall image quality.
This is looking like the way forward for Mobile photography and kudos to Oppo for pushing the envelope.
Um, the Chinese can be as good as they want to be. We are lucky to have the H-1b visa. The Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are the present and future of tech, as least in the consumer domain. Also, India, a real powerhouse.
I can see huge potential with this. Being able to shoot at 3 different FLs is a significant start to removing the last limitation of the smartphone to completely take over from all general-purpose compact P&S cameras with sensors with a size less than 1 inch.
could not agree more Sergey!
The camera manufacturer have to get down from their high horses and start producing innovative and higher quality lenses. As a m43 user I am just frustrated that non of the small pancake style (kit) lenses is of good optical quality and starts only at f3.5. There are good examples out there that one can do much better, but (I guess) due to somr marketing geniuses they rather produce crap and hope for the user to upgade to their overpriced "pro" lenses... well, user might just stop buying cameras at all and stick to their smart phones.... ...could not convince my wife now for 5 years that she needs a new camera... ...she just wants the newest phone...