Traditionally regrouping all the world’s MPEG experts in a single location, the 130th MPEG meeting has been held online due to the COVID-19 situation, from April 20th to 24th. Nonetheless, lots of important topics have been discussed and many progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject.

The Workshop provides at first, as usual, an overview of MPEG-G the new ISO standard on the compression and optimized access to genomic information, its impact on the relevant industry, on the various related standardization initiatives, use cases, sequencing technology evolution and perspectives for standardization in other –omics fields.

In line with the traditional MPEG practice of continuous improvement of the quality and performance of its standards, at its 130th meeting, MPEG promoted to FDIS a new edition of Part 1 and 2 and to FDIS Part 4 “Reference Software” and Part 5 “Conformance”. Such components of the MPEG-G standard series provide important supports to those willing to implement the standard or interested to verify the correctness and interoperability of their own implementations.

Compared to the first edition, the second editions of ISO/IEC 23092-1 and ISO/IEC 23092-2, haves been improved by taking into accounts comments received from users.

The ISO/IEC 23092-4 (MPEG-G Reference Software) standard provides a normative implementation of the standard. In conjunction with the ISO/IEC 23092-5 (MPEG-G Conformance) standard, it provides a comprehensive specification and validation support for the development of conforming decoder implementations. Interoperability of applications relying on normative decoding processes is facilitated by a reference normative decoding process and a rich set of tests and corresponding golden references.