NEWS & PRESS

JPEG Pleno Workshop Announcement and Call for Participation
March 20, 2015

Call for Participation

Warsaw, Poland – June 23rd, 2015 – 14-18h

The JPEG Committee has launched a new activity: JPEG Pleno, which is targeting a standard framework for the representation and exchange of new imaging modalities such as – but not limited to – light-field, point cloud and holographic imaging. In addition to the representation it is also a target to define new tools for improved compression while providing advanced functionality support for image manipulation, metadata, image access and interaction, privacy and security. This paradigm shift caused by computational imaging approaches will be as disruptive for the photography markets as the migration from analog film to digital pictures. Hence, JPEG Pleno investigates how this evolution can be properly addressed while taking into account JPEG’s legacy formats.

Since the JPEG committee intends to interact closely with actors in conventional and emerging imaging solutions, a workshop is organised during the JPEG meeting in Warsaw, Poland that is targeted to understanding industry needs in terms of technology and supported functionalities. The following keynote presentations are planned:

Start

  • 14:00 Touradj Ebrahimi (JPEG Convenor - EPFL): "JPEG Pleno - Introduction and Scope"

Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi received his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in Electrical Engineering, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. In 1993, he was a research engineer at the Corporate Research Laboratories of Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he conducted research on advanced video compression techniques for storage applications. In 1994, he served as a research consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on very low bitrate video coding. He is currently Professor at EPFL heading its Multimedia Signal Processing Group. He was also adjunct Professor with the Center of Quantifiable Quality of Service at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)from 2008 to 2012. Since 2014, he is convener of the JPEG committee.

Light-fields

  • 14:15 Christian Perwaß (Raytrix GmbH, Germany): "Metrically Calibrated Multi-focus Plenoptic Camera and its Applications"

Light Field cameras are a new type of 3D-cameras that capture a standard image together with the depth information of a scene. Metric 3D information can be captured with a single light field camera through a single lens in a single shot using just the available light. Raytrix has specialized on developing light field cameras for industrial applications. A patented micro lens array design allows for an optimal compromise between high effective resolution and large depth of field. Raytrix cameras are already in use in applications like volumetric velocimetry, plant phenotyping, automated optical inspection and microscopy, to name a few.

The talk will introduce the technology, show a number of applications and discuss the redundant and important aspects of a light field image for applications.

Dr. Christian Perwass received his Ph.D. in engineering from Cambridge University, UK and his habilitation in Computer Science from Kiel University, Germany. He then worked in R&D at Robert Bosch GmbH developing automated optical inspection systems before founding the company Raytrix GmbH to develop and market 3D light field cameras for research and industrial applications. He developed the award winning multi-focus plenoptic camera, which became a unique enabling technology for a number of applications in research and industry.

  • 14:40 Joachim Keinert (Fraunhofer IIS, Germany): "Lightfield media production using camera arrays - use cases and requirements"

Natural content in movies still gives the most convincing picture of reality. However, compared to computer generated models, they offer only limited flexibility in editing, which hampers creative story telling. Lightfields overcome this lack of flexibility by allowing new visual effects. In order to leverage this potential, a novel capture and processing pipeline is needed with new requirements on storage and compression technologies. The presentation will collect these requirements by a thorough analyis of a lightfield workflow and demonstrates possible future use cases by providing proof of concepts.

Dr. Joachim Keinert, Chief Scientist within Fraunhofer IIS and JPEG Systems co-chair, has specialized on multi-camera video processing and compression solutions for post-production environments. He currently leads several research projects on lightfield processing and its application for object measurements. Moreover, he is experienced in development of both hard- and software systems.

  • 14:55 Péter Kovács (Holografika, Hungary): "Light Field Displays"

Light-field 3D displays represent an emerging technology for reproducing 3D visual information, without glasses, within an unprecedented wide field of view, with full colours, updated in real-time. This presentation will give an overview of the technology behing projection-based light-field displays, its present implementations, and the ways 3D information is fed to the display. Based on the possible representations, several different methods for acquiring light-field data will be discussed, focusing on their suitability for feeding contemporary light-field displays. Aspects of real-time light-field streaming, and it’s requirements on the codec posed by the internals of light-field displays will be presented in detail.

Péter Tamás Kovács, has been working at Holografika since 2006, and became CTO of the company in 2009. He has been involved in the research and development of novel 3D display prototypes and products as well as related technologies. He received MSc degree in Computer Science from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He is currently a PhD student at the Tampere University of Technology, where he has been a visiting researcher in 2013-2014. He has served as Program Committee member and for numerous international IEEE conferences (most notably 3DTV-Con and IC3D), and the Local Organizing Chair of 3DTV-Con 2014. He is a contributing member of the International 3D Society and the International Committee for Display Metrology (ICDM), where he contributed to the first IDMS standard. He is a participating member of MPEG. He is also serving as the chair of the Working Group 5 ("3D End-User Devices") of 3D-ConTourNet COST Action.

  • 15:20 Atanas Gotchev (Tampere University of Technology): "Content creation for light-field displays"

Present generations of 3D displays including stereoscopic and autostereoscopic displays have very limited number of views, and thus limited parallax. In contrast, the emerging super-multiview or light field (LF) displays support hundred(s) of views with acceptable spatial resolution thereby enabling a more realistic representation of 3D scenes. This is accomplished for the price of high data throughput, complex data acquisition and a high demand of computational power. Thus, the optimization of the content representation is of crucial importance for the performance of the whole display system. In this presentation, we discuss the requirements for LF based processing of 3D content for representation on the new generation of ultra-realistic LF displays. We analyze the overall processing chain from acquisition through LF based modeling and representation to visualization on the considered displays. By analyzing the visualization capabilities of a given LF display using spatial and frequency domain analysis, we draw guidelines on how to properly acquire the required data and repurpose it based on the targeted display. We argue that by taking into account the properties of the display during scene sensing and during LF processing, a good visual representation of 3D content on a given display can be achieved with a compact 3D content representation, which is the first step toward an effective LF compression.

Atanas Gotchev is Associate Professor and Head of the 3D Media Group within the Department of Signal Processing, and Director of the Research Centre of Visual Technologies and User Experience (CiVIT) at Tampere University of Technology, Finland. He is also an Academy of Finland Fellow with a project about high-resolution digital holography. His research interests are in sampling and interpolation theory, spline and spectral methods with applications to multi-dimensional signal analysis, 3D video and light field acquisition, processing, and ultra-realistic display. He has been actively involved in Academy, EU and industry-funded 3D related projects, such as FP6 3DTV NoE, FP7 Mobile3DTV, 3DQoE and DigiHolo. Currently, he is Vice-Chair of the EU COST Action 3D-ConTourNet and project manager of the Marie Curie IAPP Action PROLIGHT.

  • 15:35 Roger Olsson (Mid Sweden University, Sweden): "Objective evaluation and SotA compression solutions for plenoptic image content"

The cameras of tomorrow will leverage on the advantages of having digitized optics, in addition to the well-known benefits of digitized film. Their multidimensional light field or plenoptic image content may be used in different ways depending on application. Compared to the conventional 2D image processing chain this implies additional processing steps and intermediate data formats. The presentation discusses the importance of adopting relevant objective quality evaluation methods that can assess all parts of these systems. In addition, the approach to use state-of-the-art video compression standards for plenoptic image content is presented with algorithm and image examples.

Dr. Roger Olsson is a researcher at Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden. His research interests include plenoptic image capture, processing and compression; as well as plenoptic system modelling. Olsson has a PhD in telecommunications from Mid Sweden University (2010) titled Synthesis, Coding, and Evaluation of 3D Images Based on Integral Imaging.

  • 15:50 Discussion on compression of light field data (Requirements, use cases, technologies)

  • 16:10 Break

Point-clouds

  • 16:30 Rufael Mekuria (CWI Netherlands): "Point Cloud Compression"

We demonstrate composite rendering of reconstructed point clouds in an immersive virtual world. From this mixed reality system, we derive new requirements and opportunities for point cloud compression in such applications. We detail a novel point cloud codec that includes the traditional octree coding scheme, but with enhancements for both color attribute coding (via the legacy JPEG codec!) and improved temporal prediction based on ICP. We show some of the results rendering the decoded clouds in the virtual world. Based on the results, we discuss challenges in quality assesment, codec development and highlight some opportunities for collaboration between the MPEG and JPEG commitees in this area.

Rufael Mekuria has been a researcher with CWI since sept. 2011, involved in the Reverie FP7 project. He has co-chaired the AhG on 3DG in MPEG since jan. 2014. He has been an invited scholar at the University of Illinois/Champaign in 2014 and received the best paper award in the ACM Multimedia Systems Conference in 2013.

  • 16:45 Discussion on compression of point cloud data  (Requirements, use cases, technologies)

Holography

  • 16:55 Malgorzata Kujawinska (Warsaw University of technology): "Holographic capturing and rendering systems, suitable data representations for phase and amplitude"

Two different application oriented scenarios of holographic data capture and processing is presented, namely digital holographic microscopy and holographic display. The requirements for delivering holographic data for quantitative (metrological) and visual perception purposes are discussed. Specifically the full technology chain supporting wide angle digital holographic television from holographic capture of real world objects/scenes to holographic display with an extended viewing angle is presented and the methodology which allows for significant decoupling of the capture and display systems is discussed. The concept of multi-source data capture, multi-representation processing and rendering to provide purely holographic content for future 3D displays is presented.
Prof. Malgorzata Kujawinska PhD DSc., SPIE Fellow, Full Professor of applied optics at Warsaw University of Technology. Expert in full-field optical metrology, optical and digital holography, 3D data capture and processing, automatic data analysis and design of novel photonics measurement and display systems. Vice-President of European Technology Platform Photonics 21.

  • 17:10 Frederic Dufaux (TELECOM ParisTech, France): "Digital Holography Compression"

Holography has the potential to become the ultimate 3D experience. Nevertheless, in order to achieve practical working systems, major scientific and technological challenges have to be tackled. In this presentation, we more specifically consider the problem of representation and compression of holographic data. Indeed, digital holographic data represents a huge amount of information, which has to be efficiently handled. Clearly, the development of efficient compression techniques is a key component. Existing video compression techniques (e.g. JPEG or MPEG) remains sub-optimal, calling for innovative compression solutions. In this presentation, we will discuss state-of-the-art compression techniques for digital holographic data.

Prof. Frédéric Dufaux is a CNRS Research Director at Telecom ParisTech. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing: Image Communication. He received his M.Sc. in physics and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from EPFL in 1990 and 1994 respectively. His research interests include image and video coding, 3D video, high dynamic range imaging, and visual quality assessment. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 research publications.

  • 17:35 Discussion on compression of holographic data  (Requirements, use cases, technologies)

  • 17:50 Conclusions

Interested parties are invited to participate to this workshop and if interested to propose contributions as well. The latter would typically exist of a short presentation of max. 10 minutes addressing requirements, applications and use cases, and relevant technologies for the addressed domains. The organising committee will make a selection out of the received contributions. The deadline for proposed contributions is April 30th, 2015.

If you are interested to deliver a contribution to workshop, please contact Peter Schelkens ().

Registration for the workshop is free and is be possible at the following webpage: http://kcmweb.de/conferences/.

Organising Committee: Peter Schelkens (VUB – iMinds, Belgium), Fernando Pereira (IST-IT, Portugal), Touradj Ebrahimi (EPFL, Switzerland), Joachim Keinert (Fraunhofer IIS, Germany), Andrea De Polo (Italy), Marek Domanski (PUT, Poland).

To stay posted on the action plan for JPEG Pleno, please regularly consult our website or optionally subscribe to our e-mail reflector: (in order to subscribe to the mailing list, you simply have to send an empty email to – and – and follow the steps of the e-mail being received).