MPEG Meeting

Due to the COVID-19 situation, the 131st MPEG meeting has been held online from July 6th until 10th, 2020. Nonetheless, many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject.

WG11 (MPEG) issues a Call for Proposals on extension and improvements to ISO/IEC 23092 standard series

The current MPEG-G standard series (ISO/IEC 23092) is the first generation of MPEG standards that address the representation, compression, and transport of genome sequencing data, supporting with a single unified approach data from the output of sequencing machines up to secondary and tertiary analysis. New technology for compressing and indexing a wide variety of annotation data is currently under advanced standardization phase. 

In line with the traditional MPEG practice of investigating and applying whenever possible improvements to the performance and functionality of its standards, at its 131st meeting, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) addressing two specific objectives: (i) to increase the speed performance of massively parallel codec implementations and (ii) to enable advanced queries and search capabilities on the compressed data.

Answers to the CfP are expected to be evaluated prior to the 132nd MPEG meeting. Best performing technology are expected to be introduced in a new high-performance profile of current ISO/IEC 23092 standard series.

During the Meeting MPEG published standard documents for MPEG-G including MPEG-G Genomic Information DatabaseFinal Joint Call for Proposals for extensions and improvements of ISO/IEC 23092 seriesFinal Requirements for ISO/IEC 23092 series extensions and Evaluation procedure for the Call for Proposals for extensions and improvements of ISO/IEC 23092 series.

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