Page 152 - ITU Journal, ICT Discoveries, Volume 3, No. 1, June 2020 Special issue: The future of video and immersive media

ITU Journal: ICT Discoveries, Vol. 3(1), June 2020

The most comprehensive sets of requirements were provided by the NIC Group of CCITT [8]. The author
analysed the (at that time existing) different CCITT-applications and -services, e.g. videotex photographic
mode, colour facsimile, hard and soft copy facsimile, office document architecture (actually another common
text project with ISO TC97), teleconferencing, videotelephony still picture mode and digital phototelegraphy.
In a contribution [8] to the CCITT SGVIII Q.18 NIC group, NIC capable terminals and servers were defined with
functionality very similar to that which a well-equipped personal computer (PC) would have a few years later
on the Internet. Interworking among the various CCITT services and applications was also an important
requirement (see Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 – Interworking with existing telematics services is always an ITU requirement,
thus a NIC-capable terminal had to do it too.
Out of all these requirements came the toolbox concept that first Q.18 NIC Group and later JPEG adopted. That
concept was followed by several other ISO/IEC JTC1 and ITU-T still and motion image coding standardization
projects, e.g. JPEG2000, which started in 1997. Even ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group)
has taken over that concept for several of their projects.

In the following, some pages and figures from [8] are included (Figs. 5 to 9).

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