Intellectual Property Rights Have Key Role in VICA Standards

“The number of codecs in application environments has been increasing… It’s a trend that emerged in audio and speech coding years ago and now video is following a similar pattern,” said Gary Sullivan of Microsoft and reporting member for video coding in ITU-T study group 16. The trend is aggravating the complexity of IPR for video, officials said.

Users now have 7 digital video coding standards -- 1/2 of which remain in common use -- and 3 candidates that have popped up, Sullivan said.

The complexity of patent licensing for standards and codecs sometimes delays their use, officials said. While cost is an issue for future standards, “a bigger issue is uncertainty,” said Dave Lindberg of Polycom and another reporting member for ITU-T study group 16.

The H.264 standard used an open, collaborative approach with major standards bodies, but IPR significantly complicated licensing and discouraged deployment, officials said. Less orthodox alternative models have included a single company design, later opened up to standardization. The VC-1 standard showed a single company design reaching a standards body only after the design was completed, officials said.

China is trying a new approach to licensing policies with Advanced Audio Video Coding Standard in Information Technology (AVS). AVS is an IPR-guided design influenced by IPR analysis from the start, said Sullivan. AVS puts IPR concerns and pooling efforts ahead of the standardization process. While it’s being developed as a national standard, officials said international pricing is being considered.

Overtly or subconsciously, IPR issues affect adoption and deployment decisions, as well as the motivations of those doing the video coding designs, said Sullivan.

Effective handling of IPR issues is a key to success for image coding standards, said Istv?n Sebestyen of Siemens and vice-chmn. of ITU-T study group 16. Better interaction is needed between codec and protocol/application standardization, for example between JPEG and 3GPP, he said.

IPR strongly affects adoption, said Sullivan. Solving the IPR issue may be the biggest problem facing the standards community, said SG-16 associate rapporteur Thomas Wiegand.

Image and video coding standards play an important role in surveillance, too -- for example, allowing selective coding of a region of interest at a higher resolution than the rest of the image and scrambling all or part of the image to allay privacy concerns, officials said.

JPEG2000 lets uses detect events, define regions of interest and scramble all or part of images, said Virginie Carniel of Emitall Surveillance. Scalability in resolution or quality allows development of very efficient systems using mobile devices or the Internet.

The next compression standards must factor-in trends in networking conditions, display and capture possibilities and varying complexity, officials said. Some day, compression may no longer be needed, but today it’s not clear that even H.264 is good enough, officials said.

ITU-T study group 16 is meeting today (Tues.)-Aug. 5 and will consider “h.460.fantas” and “h.460.ma.” Those will enable H.323 systems to traverse NATs and firewalls in support of VoIP, video conferencing, video telephony and voice.

SG 16 is eyeing a next generation standard for multimedia telecommunications, tentatively called H.325. Two main models are being weighed. A streamlined conventional model recalls H.323 and H.324. The other, more radical model could be based on a Java Genie and software defined radio model involving downloadable code that might even include downloadable codecs. Much remains to be discussed, said Lindberg.

An Oct. 16 workshop on video compression will occur in Nice, France,ahead of the Oct. 17-21 MPEG meeting.