Introduction Artificial intelligence has reached the attention of mass media and technologies supporting it – Neural Networks (NN) – are being deployed in several contexts affecting a growing number of…

Introduction The well-known double helix carries the DNA of living beings. The DNA of humans contains about 3.2 billion nucleotide base pairs represented by the quaternary symbols (A, G, C,…

In Compression standards for the data industries I reported the proposal made by the Italian ISO member body to establish a Technical Committee on Data Compression Technologies. The proposal was rejected on…

So far MPEG has developed, is completing or is planning to develop 22 standards for a total of 201 specifications. For those not in MPEG, and even for some active…

The goal of MPEG-1 was to leverage the manufacturing power of the Consumer Electronics (CE) industry to develop the basic audio and video compression technology for an application that was…

MPEG-2 was a more complex beast to deal with. A digitised TV channel can yield 20-24 Mbit/s, depending on the delivery system (terrestrial/satellite broadcasting or cable TV). Digital stereo audio…

MPEG-4 had the ambition of bringing interactive 3D spaces to every home. Media objects such as audio, video, 2D graphics were an enticing notion in the mid-1990’s. The WWW had…

In the late 1990’s the industry had been captured by the vision of “500 hundred channels” and telcos thought they could offer interactive media services. With the then being deployed…

In the year 1999 MPEG understood that its technologies were having a disruptive impact on the media business. MPEG thought that the industry should not fend of a new threat…

The official title of MPEG-A is Multimedia Application Formats. The idea behind MPEG-A is kind of obvious: we have standards for media elements (audio, video 3D graphics, metadata etc.), but…