Geneva, 2020/09/12

Formation of Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial Intelligence (MPAI) was announced in July 2020. It is planned to be established as a non-profit organisation by the end of September 2020. It will develop technical specifications of data coding, especi­ally using Artificial Intelligence, and their integration in Information and Communication Technology systems, brid­ging the gap between its technical specifications and their practical use through Intellectual Property Rights Guidelines, such as Framework Licences.

Today MPAI announces that one use case – Context-based Audio Enhancement (MPAI-CAE) – has reached sufficient maturity to warrant the start of the next stage where detailed functional requirements are identified.

MPAI-CAE addresses a variety of consumer-oriented use cases, e.g. entertain­ment, voice com­munication, audio conferencing, gaming etc. relevant to different contexts – e.g., at home, in the car and on the go – that may greatly influence the audio experience. MPAI-CAE also addresses professional applications such as audio (post-)production and restoration.

The MPAI-CAE standard will specify

  1. Input and output interfaces for a set of contexts
  2. Interfaces of updatable and extensible processing modules, both traditional and AI-based, to create processing pipelines for possibly partly local and partly on-the-cloud execution
  3. Interfaces of the processed audio signals to a variety of delivery protocols.

MPAI envisages that technology providers will benefit from a wider usage of their technologies beyond their specific domains; application vendors adopting the emerging MPAI-CAE standard will be able to tap from the common set of technologies to support their specific needs; service providers will benefit from an accelerated delivery by being able to integrate third parties’ components from both a technical and licensing perspective; and end users will be able to tap from a competitive market providing constantly improved user experiences and AI-based audio endpoints.

MPAI is investigating several other draft projects in the area of coding of still and moving pictures, event sequences and other data such as interferometric data for gravitational-wave detection and genomic data. They are expected to become standard develop­ment projects as they mature.

About MPAI

MPAI is a non-profit, unaffiliated association whose goal is to establish a set of standards for advanced audio, video and data coding using artificial intelligence and to establish procedures that facilitate the timely and effective use of the standards it develops.

Any entity, such as corporation and individual firm, partnership, university, governmental body or international organisation supporting the mission of MPAI may apply for membership, provided that it is able to contribute to the development of technical specifications for the efficient use of data.

For further information, please contact leonardo@chiariglione.org and see https://mpai.community for MPAI and https://mpai.community/2020/09/12/mpai-cae/ for more details on MPAI-CAE.