Encoding was once again high up the agenda in the Technical Paper submissions at IBC2019.

MPEG-DASH for personalised ad insertion

Encoding: MPEG-DASH 

At the IBC2019 Awards, the trophy for the best technical paper was awarded for work on delivering augmented reality to mobile devices. Sebastian Schwarz and Mika Pesonen of Nokia Technologies collected on behalf of co-author Jani Nurminen of Innogiant.

The work they are leading uses existing video codecs built into mobile phones to support complex multi-dimensional services. The proposed technique is known as V-PCC, for video point cloud coding. It was detailed in the paper Real-time decoding and AR playback of the emerging MPEG video-based point cloud compression standard.

That theme – the use of encoding to solve common and complex problems in the industry – was a common theme among this year’s Technical Papers submissions.

In another paper that was submitted at the 2019 show, Jonatan Samuelsson, Kiho Choi, Jianle Chen, and Dmytro Rusanovskyy looked how the emerging MPEG-5 EVC standard will impact technology and applications in the broadcast and media sector.

“One of the most central technology components in digital media distribution and consumption is compression and in particular video compression, since video data represents by far the largest amount of data in most media services,” the technical paper says.

It notes that compression efficiency is not the only factor that determines how well a codec is suited for usage in different application areas or how widely deployed the codec will become.

The MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) standard, which is being developed by MPEG, is looked at in the paper.

With compression also comes the question of rendering for highly immersive 8K+ applications. In their technical paper, M. Alvarez-Mesa, S. Sanz-Rodríguez, C. C. Chi, M. Glowiak, R. Haring set out a set of tools designed to simplify the distribution, playback and adaptation of high-quality immersive content for new immersive environments.

The tools are based on a high-performance HEVC codec that allows encoding, decode and play ultra-high-resolution video in 8K and 16K resolutions using standard computing systems.

According to the paper, initial results show that the new tools enable ultra-high-resolution immersive video playback and first evaluations indicate that a better immersive experience for final users can be achieved, while at the same time using a simpler workflow.