By ITU News

Advances in multimedia have changed our world, revolutionizing entertainment, connecting friends and families around the globe, enriching our communications experiences and enabling major improvements in medical care and education.

The latest issue of the ITU Journal analyzes the state of the art in multimedia and innovations appearing on the horizon.

Papers address the latest developments in video and image coding and resulting prospects for new media experiences. They highlight immersive media experiences entering education, sports and entertainment. They look at the growing influence of machine learning on multimedia coding. And they highlight the route towards accessible immersive media to ensure that people with disabilities can share in experiences such as Virtual Reality.

Video now accounts for around 80 per cent of all Internet traffic.

The majority of this video is coded using international standards developed in collaboration by the world’s three leading standards bodies, ITU, ISO and IEC.

RELATED: New ‘Versatile Video Coding’ standard to enable next-generation video compression

This work has been honoured with two Primetime Emmy Awards, recognizing ITU H.264 | MPEG-4 ‘Advanced Video Coding’ and ‘High Efficiency Video Coding’ (HEVC, published as ITU H.265 | ISO/IEC 23008-2).

This latest issue of the ITU Journal draws on the expertise of the community responsible for this strong tradition of standardization work, a tradition that has always featured key contributions from academia.

It shares insight into standards such as ‘Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding’, ‘Essential Video Coding’, ‘High Efficiency Video Coding’, and the new ‘Versatile Video Coding’ standard to enable next-generation video compression with unprecedented application versatility.

RELATED: How JPEG, released in 1992, gained Emmy fame in 2019

It highlights the latest developments in JPEG towards plenoptic image coding but it also tells the story behind the first JPEG standard, another Emmy-winning success story that played a formative role in establishing the user-centric approach to multimedia standardization that endures today.

Access the papers free of charge

Download the full issue of the journal or navigate directly to papers of interest:

1. Delivering object-based immersive media experiences in sports
2. Immersive media and accessibility: Hand in hand to the future
3. Multi-viewpoint and overlays in the MPEG OMAF standard
4. Data-driven intra-prediction modes in the development of the versatile video coding standard
5. Arena-style immersive live experience (ILE) services and systems: Highly realistic sensations for everyone in the world 
6. Beyond the frontiers of education: How immersive media changes the way we learn
7. Trends and advancements in deep neural network communication
8. A study of the extended perceptually weighted peak signal-to-noise ratio (XPSNR) for video compression with different resolutions and bit depths
9. The video codec landscape in 2020
10. JPEG Pleno: Standardizing a coding framework and tools for plenoptic imaging modalities
11. A new set of directional weights for ITU-R BS.1770 loudness measurement of multichannel audio
12. Overview of MPEG-5 Part 2 – Low complexity enhancement video coding (LCEVC) 
13. History review paper: Some little-known aspects of the history of the JPEG still picture-coding standard, ITU-T T.81 | ISO/IEC 10918-1 (1986-1993)