With the ongoing COVID-19 situation, the 132nd MPEG meeting has been held again digitally from October 12th until 16th, 2020. Nonetheless, many important topics have been discussed, and progress and improvements have been made in the specific ISO 23092 MPEG-G subject.

MPEG evaluates Extensions and Improvements to MPEG-G and Announces a Call for Evidence on New Advanced Genomics Features and Technologies

The extensive use 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 that are stored in various repositories around the world. One challenge is to efficiently handle the increasing flood of sequencing data. A second challenge is the ability to process such a flood of data in order to 1) expand scientific knowledge of genome sequence information and 2) search genome databases for diagnostic and therapeutic 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) deals with the representation, compression, and transport of genome sequencing data, with support for annotation data under development. These specifications provide a file and transport format, compression technology, metadata specifications, protection support, and standard APIs for accessing genomic data in its native compressed format.

In response to a call for proposals issued at the 131^st meeting, MPEG received submissions addressing low-complexity coding modes that directly improve coding and decoding speed to enable access to data with lower latency, and for advanced sequencing data and metadata indexing and search that can be applied to both aligned and unaligned data directly in the compressed domain. In addition, technologies for compressing and indexing of aligned and unaligned read data were proposed. MPEG is currently evaluating the integration of these new technologies into the MEPG-G standard series.

In line with MPEG’s traditional practice of continuously improving the quality and performance of its standards, MPEG issued a public Call for Evidence (CfE) at its 132^nd meeting. This CfE aims to evaluate the performance of new technologies that 1) can demonstrate that the current compression, transport, and indexing technology of the ISO/IEC 23092 series can be improved with new compression technologies, especially for very long reads, and 2) can yield higher compression rate, support new features or improve the performance of other important metrics.

MPEG evaluates extensions and improvements to MPEG-G and announces Call for Evidence 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. A second challenge is the ability to process such a deluge of data in order 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.

Current MPEG-G standard series (ISO/IEC 23092) address 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 response to a Call for Proposals issued at the 131st meeting, MPEG is evaluating extensions to the MPEG-G standard series. Submissions have been received addressing low complexity coding modes to directly improve the speed of encoding and decoding to provide faster, reduced latency access to data, as well as advanced sequencing data and metadata indexing and search which can be applied to both aligned and unaligned data directly in the compressed domain. In addition, technologies have been proposed for compressing and indexing aligned and unaligned read data.

In line with the traditional MPEG practice of continuous improvement of the quality and performance of its standards, at its 1^st SC29/WG8 meeting, MPEG has issued a public Call for Evidence (CfE). This CfE aims to assess the performance of new technologies that can 1) demonstrate that current compression, transport and indexing technology of ISO/IEC 23092 series can be improved with new compression technologies, particularly applied to very long reads, and 2) can yield higher compression rate, support new functionality or improve performance of other metrics.

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

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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 131^st 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 132^nd 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 Database, Final Joint Call for Proposals for extensions and improvements of ISO/IEC 23092 series, Final 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.

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 130^th 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.