Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
Yes I am and I have been with MPEG for last 20 years.
What do you think makes MPEG special?
MPEG has played pivotal roles among industry, markets, research organizations, academia and country’s standard bodies, governments to develop necessiated standards from their requirements. Especially, MPEG has mostly been proactive in such standard developments by delivering the specifications for use.
What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
MPEG is the flower of the 3rd Industrial Revolution by Information Technology and it has accelerated into our daily life the fast penetration and easy use of new forms of digital media. MPEG’s video, audio and systems standards has greatly impacted the wide spread consumption of audiovisual contents everywhere and anytime over digital devices. Furthermore, the industry is also one of the most beneficiaries of MPEG technologies by which, I would like to say, ‘MPEG industry’ has been born with electronic components, equipment, devices and services that support the MPEG so that new higher value-added businesses became possible.
Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
MPEG has been an excellent place (even better than conference) for research. Actually, the roadmap of MPEG and standardization activities has helped many research organizations to win their national or industry projects. Also MPEG has been a good place for their works to be internationally standardized so that they could be used in industry and deployed in markets.
Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
MPEG standard development has competitive and collaborative phases where many technical proposals with various ideas are inputted followed by intensive technical debates and verifications in the competitive phase. I think that this is a good combination of work processes in developing strong and competitive standards. I experienced that my initial technical proposals have gone through several revisions via tough evaluations and valuable comments and finally turned out to be improved levels of perfection, which I believe is a strong point of MPEG standardization. In general, in order for MPEG to produce the standard specifications of high technology-readiness levels, the chairmanship is important in evaluating and making decision on technical proposals with fairness and preciseness, which however has not been always taken place in such a way. Sometimes, the voices of some leading delegates and big companies have influenced the evaluation and decision on the technical proposals and the processes of standardization.
Are you happy with MPEG standards?
Not always. MPEG has produced really useful and competitive standards which have been qickly adopted in markets/industry and deployed in services. However, since MPEG has expanded its scope of standardization into broad areas, many standardization activities are taken placed in MPEG, producing a number of MPEG standard specifications. Unfortunately, many of them are dying out without any use in industry and services.
Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
Some MPEG standards are still very competitive compared to the existing privite technologies own by key players in industry. Especially, MPEG Video, Audio and Systems specifications are in such competitive categories. One of the MPEG having a strong competitiveness is that MPEG is still a strong pivotal place where more competitive standard specifications are being produced by several hundres of world experts than others. However, as mentioned in 6, other standard specifications do not seem to always useful and attractive outside MPEG.
What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
I expect that MPEG will explore new key technologies and standarize them as it has always done. Traditional compression approaches to video and audio signals will see more saturation of coding efficiency improvement due to their structure and complexity limits. Importantly, it might be worthwhile for MPEG to explore future coding technologies such as video/audio coding technologies with deep neural networks (DNN) for hybrid coding technologies with DNN components and fully end-to-end DNN based coding technologies. Although edge computing with the current DNN architectures are very difficult to run in light-weight devices, it is expected that we will see in the future the new computational hardware architectures based on new materials and new electronic components, which would be best fitted for low-cost DNN computation. In such a day, I believe MPEG will face the 2nd blossoming season of MPEG media technologies.
