MPEG meeting

In April 2021, from the 26th until the 30th, the 134th MPEG meeting was held digitally regarding the COVID-19 situation. Many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject.

MPEG announced a Call for Proposals on New Advanced Genomics Features and Technologies

The extensive usage of high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies enables a new approach to healthcare known as “precision medicine”. DNA sequencing technologies produce extremely large amounts of raw data which are stored in different repositories worldwide. One challenge is to efficiently handle the increasing flood of sequencing data. Another challenge is the ability to process such a deluge of data to 1) increase the scientific knowledge of genome sequence information and 2) search genome databases for diagnosis and therapy purposes. High-performance compression of genomic data is required to reduce the storage size and increase transmission speed of large data sets.

The current MPEG-G standard series (ISO/IEC 23092) addresses the representation, compression, and transport of genome sequencing data with support for annotation data under development. They provide a file and transport format, compression technology, metadata specifications, protection support, and standard APIs for the access of genomic data in the native compressed format.

In line with the traditional MPEG practice of continuous improvement of the quality and performance of its standards, after having assessed the evidence of the availability of new technology at its 134th meeting, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposals (CfP). This CfP aims to collect submissions of new technologies that can (i) provide improvements to the current compression, transport and indexing capabilities of the ISO/IEC 23092 standards suite, particularly applied to data consisting of very long reads generated by 3rd generation sequencing devices, (ii) provide the support for representation and usage of graph genome references, (iii) include coding modes relying on machine learning processes, satisfying data access modalities required by machine learning and providing higher compression, and (iv) support of interfaces with existing standards for the interchange of clinical data.

Companies and organizations are invited to submit proposals in response to this call. Parties do not need to be MPEG members to respond. Responses should be submitted by January 10th, 2022 and will be evaluated during the 137th MPEG meeting in January. Detailed information, including instructions on how to respond to the call for proposals, the requirements that must be considered, the test data to be used, and the submission and evaluation procedures for proponents are available at http://www.mpeg.org/, submenu Emerging Technologies. For further information about the call, please contact Dr. Igor Curcio, WG 02 MPEG Technical Requirements Convenor, at igor.curcio@nokia.com and Dr. Marco Mattavelli, WG 08 MPEG Genomic Coding Convenor, at marco.mattavelli@epfl.ch.

Documents from the MPEG meeting concerning MPEG-G:

The Joint Call for Proposals on new advanced features and new technologies for MPEG-G can be found here.

The Requirements for the Joint Call for Proposals on New Advanced Features and New Technologies for MPEG-G be found here.

The Evaluation Procedure for the Joint Call for Proposals on New Advanced Features and New Technologies for MPEG-G be found here.

A summary of the main achievements from the MPEG meeting can be found here.

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