Standardization effort purpose

The FP7 ICT CONCERTO project is expected to produce innovative solutions in several areas, in particular in the domains of networking and video coding. The developed new schemes are in particular meant to be exploited for contributions to international standards. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is regarded as on of the major standardization bodies targeted in CONCERTO. In addition, the work on high compression-efficient and high quality video codecs is planned to be used in the context of standardization at the relevant bodies (i.e., ISO/IEC MPEG, ITU-T VCEG, and its joint group JCT-VC). The following list gives an overview of the standardization groups targeted by the FP7 ICT CONCERTO project.

3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)

3GPP stand for “3^rd Generation Partnership”. It unites 6 key telecom standards bodies of Asia, Europe and USA. 3GPP was created at the end of 1998, with the aim of building from the GSM standards a 3^rd Generation of wireless network system. Following the development of wireless technologies as W-CDMA, HDPA and LTE and its associated core network, 3GPP has defined in its Release 10, the main technologies that are recognised by the ITU as part of the IMT-Advanced Technologies. 3GPP Technical Specification Group related to the Service & Systems Aspects, Radio Access Network, and Core Network & Terminals are relevant target for disseminating the project inovations.

Image/video coding

Visual Coding Experts Group (VCEG)

In preparation for the work on HEVC, VCEG investigated on new tools for coding efficiency. In order to compare the results of the different tools, VCEG therefore established a joint software platform (i.e., the KTA software) to integrate well performing proposals. In addition, VCEG continued to work on the requirements for a potential new video standard (i.e., "H.265"). These activities resulted into a standardisation project named High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which is executed jointly with MPEG in the JCT-VC (see below).

Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG)

MPEG's exploration on New Challenges in Video Coding Standardization resulted in the development of a new video coding standard (i.e., HEVC). The requirements set by this group are similar to those defined by VCEG. The planned extensions for HEVC (i.e., MPEG-H Part 2) comprise scalable video coding (SVC), multiview video coding (MVC), and 3D video.

Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC)

The JCT-VC is a joint group of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T SG16 WP3. The JCT-VC was established in April 2010, when it had its first meeting in Dresden, where experts from MPEG and VCEG participated. It is currently working on the standardization project on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). HEVC can be seen as the successor of the H.264/AVC standard. The goal for HEVC is the improvement of compression efficiency by 50%. CONCERTO contributed to the development of HEVC with contributions for high-quality video coding. Most notably, proposals were made to define relevant profiles for the coding of medical image data like computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance (MR) with an image format for high-bit-depth (i.e., 12-bit and 16-bit) monochrome content.