How are standards an asset for corporate innovation?

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is a consortium dedicated to the development of international standards for compressing and processing multimedia content, including audio, video and 3D graphics, for a large number of applications. With its simultaneously prospective, technological and economic positioning, MPEG represents an international working space that uses the results of research to set standards in order to promote innovation. Within the MPEG, Marius Preda has been reappointed as Convenor of Working Group 7 (WG 7), MPEG Coding of 3D Graphics & Haptics, for an additional 3-year term starting from January 1, 2024.

WG 7 is responsible for developing standards for coding representations of n-dimensional data, whether computer-generated or captured from the real world via various technologies. This includes 3D graphic environments and objects, and extends to the integration of synthetic and real content, facilitating interactive, dynamic and potentially immersive user experiences.

Coordination of standardization bodies at a global level

As Convenor of Working Group 7 (WG 7), Marius Preda plays an essential role within ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standardization / International Electrotechnical Commission), with missions centered around:

Analyzing current needs and technological trends in the 3D sector, while undertaking prospective research to proactively integrate emerging innovations in the group’s research.

• Recommending new work on a set of standards aligned with the group’s activities to ensure their compatibility and relevance.
• Actively participating in designing effective and innovative coding algorithms for different 3D graphic representations and related metadata.
• Defining specific criteria to evaluate the performance and complexity of developed solutions, to ensure their effectiveness and applicability.
• Organizing and supervising rigorous evaluation tests aiming to measure the quality, performance and complexity of coding algorithms for 3D graphic data.
• Ensuring the availability of source code to be implemented for the proposed standards, facilitating their adoption and evaluation.
• Establishing and maintaining collaborations with other standardization entities operating in similar fields, including requesting and integrating external contributions and liaison management.

In summary, the Convenor role occupied by Marius Preda is essential for the future of standardization technology, as it ensures that current developments respect ISO/IEC standards and procedures while adhering to set timelines.

“To this end, four international meetings are held each year, bringing together representatives of the United States, Japan, China, Korea, EU Member States, and Switzerland, among others. 90% of participants are economic actors from major companies, innovative SMEs or start-ups. Along with them, academic researchers play a major role in leading disruptive innovations. These meetings are important spaces where the world collaborates, shares and debates propositions to create the future digital technology standards for interoperable services.”

In this role as Convenor, Marius Preda has the power to determine which paths to explore, as well as the duty to take all proposals into account and ensure they are discussed by WG 7 in order to consensually determine the best solutions to investigate and promote.

This approach makes it possible to build a collective vision in the medium term through technical research that benefits all stakeholders.

The advantage of a Convenor in France for French companies

Any kind of participation in the standardization process is on a voluntary basis for companies.  It requires a high level of resilience, long-term commitment, good knowledge of the standardization process and means of expertise and funding. Having a WG 7 Convenor who provides an international perspective enriches the process. It facilitates the development of professional connections, both during official meetings and in informal contexts, where projects and technologies can be discussed, debated and finally proposed for standardization.

However, it is crucial that the Convenor maintains a position of neutrality and objectivity, which is essential during the evaluation and selection of technologies presented, in order to guarantee that the standardization process remains equitable and inclusive for all participants, no matter their geographic origin.

Marius Preda recognizes that “this exercise is greatly facilitated by the fact that I myself am a research professor. Not only does this provide me with a good understanding of research, which is key during prospective discussions, but also the requisite intellectual rigor which is essential in my daily work with my PhD students and when writing publications or conference presentations.”

Research professor and Convenor, two mutually beneficial roles

In his role as a research professor, Marius Preda draws much of his inspiration and knowledge from conferences and academic publications. Integrating this information with the specifications and use scenarios listed in WG 7 allows him to formulate relevant proposals for standardization processes.

This approach also help create avenues for innovative research, offering advanced technological solutions aimed at streamlining the transfer of expertise and technology to industry. By remaining at the forefront of research trends, he is capable of identifying critical needs and required strategic collaborations. This helps him evaluate the opportunities for pursuing the exploration of certain ideas from the perspective of their standardization potential.

Working sessions in standardization involve the collaboration of a large team of international experts: over 120 participants at in-person meetings and around 250 at remote meetings. For Marius Preda, “it’s incredible to see the speed at which we can progress when such a large number of people devote themselves to a single objective. Of course, it is only possible because there are experimentation and evaluation protocols that are fully shared."

What are the trends around the standardization of 3D content?

Historically, WG 7 was dedicated to the compression of 3D graphic content, a crucial technical step forward to enrich augmented and virtual reality experiences, which also supported the evolution of the Metaverse. This concept refers to a collection of online services offering simulations of shared, long-term 3D spaces in real-time, where users can have collective, immersive experiences. The objective is to make these virtual universes more accessible and realistic, thereby opening the door to new forms of interaction and collaboration in sophisticated virtual environments. As predicted, artificial intelligence (AI) occupies a central position in current developments, with a significant trend emerging whereby AI will supplement or even replace classic signal processing techniques used by digital models.

For more than half a century, signal theory and signal processing have been at the heart of research efforts around information compression. Historically, these fields have required a sophisticated fusion of physical models, mathematical methods and efficient algorithms. This approach has enabled significant progress, refining models in order to adapt them specifically to processed signals and integrating “intelligence” elements to create increasingly advanced compression techniques. This period was marked by a quest for a deep understanding of the underlying physical phenomena and modeling them precisely in signal processing.

However, the arrival of artificial intelligence marked a turning point. Nowadays, emphasis is no longer placed on the physical modeling of phenomena, but rather on purely digital analysis. AI models are freed from the constraints of understanding and modeling physical phenomena, which has allowed them to open up new paths by concentrating solely on the effectiveness of data compression. This evolution marks a shift from an approach founded on the detailed understanding of signals, to a method using processing power to analyze and compress information in a more abstract and potentially higher-performing way.

“We are now studying how deep neural networks analyze the original signal, by transforming it in a latent compact space, then transmitting it and successfully reconstructing it for the user’s terminal.”

However, Marius Preda highlights that this new method marks a break with the traditional content-neutral approach, which dominated in signal theory for compression algorithms up until this point. Previously, these algorithms processed various kinds of images or videos in the exact same way, whether it was a view of a landscape or a portrait of a person.

“The process used by artificial intelligence models means that they can inherently differentiate between an image taken outside and a portrait photo, and process them appropriately. For example, the compression of facial images can lead to particularly low speeds, given the high level of intrinsic similarity in the “face” object, despite the many variations. The network is specifically designed to recognize and learn these nuances.”

An exceptional course for young researchers

Within standardization bodies, there are subjects that are highly relevant for research, making them ideal for doctoral research. Furthermore, our students and PhD candidates who worked on MPEG-related subjects experienced a meteoric rise in their career. It’s the perfect context for a thesis, partly because of the availability of qualified data and the robustness of scientific and technological experiments undertaken.

“We have access to descriptions of experiments and metrics, and even if there’s not everything, there are at least 200 pairs of eyes examining the same object. That means that when you start an experiment, you can trust in its robustness and methodology. It’s a far cry from the young researcher working with their PhD supervisor on their topic in the laboratory.”

This competitive research environment also benefits doctoral students, who are highly sought after by companies and organizations after graduating. Standardization is a veritable springboard for a professional career in cutting-edge engineering.