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SG 16 at a glance (Study Period 2009 - 2012)

ITU-T Study Group 16 - Multimedia coding, systems and applications

This page refers to a previous study period. For its most recent version, please see here.

Study Group 16 leads the ITU-T work on multimedia (MM) coding, terminals, systems and applications, including the coordination of the studies among the various ITU-T SGs. It is also the lead study group for ubiquitous applications ("e-everything", such as e-health and e-business), and for telecommunication/ICT accessibility for persons with disabilities.

SG16 is active in all aspects of MM standardization, including terminals, architecture, protocols, security, mobility, interworking and quality of service. It focuses its studies on telepresence and conferencing systems; IPTV; directory services; speech, audio and visual coding; PSTN modems and interfaces; facsimile terminals; ICT accessibility, etc.

The SG is home to some very well known standards, including the V-series modem Recommendations (V.34, V.90 etc), without which the Internet would not enjoy its current state of ubiquity. Anyone accessing the Internet before the advent of ISDN, and then broadband technologies, would have used a modem built according to these ITU specifications. If proprietary standards had been adopted, the Internet's development could well have been far more fragmented. Even today, modems remain a very important way of accessing the Internet and SG16's work to extend the life of modems for transport over next generation networks is thus very important.

Also part of SG 16's heritage is its fax work, including standards for high-speed fax over PSTN, ISDN and IP networks, and a recent extension for colour fax transmission.

Work highlights

Study Group 16 is home to all media coding work in ITU-T. This includes narrowband and wideband speech coders, and work done together with ISO/IEC's JPEG and MPEG working groups in image and video compression, including JPEG and JPEG 2000 (T.80 and T.800 series) and MPEG 2 Video (H.262). Most recently this collaboration has led to the video compression standard known as H.264 (or MPEG-4 pt.10/ AVC). H.264/AVC is the first truly scalable video codec, delivering excellent quality across the entire bandwidth spectrum - from high definition television to videoconferencing and 3G mobile multimedia. Building on the success of this collaboration, the JCT-VC was created to develop the successor to H.264/AVC. This successor will allow a further 50% reduction in the data rate needed for high quality video coding.

SG 16 is the origin of a wide family of successful videoconferencing systems tailored for several networks: H.320 and H.310 for narrow- and broadband ISDN, H.324 for PSTN and 3rd Generation mobile. Also very well known is H.323, the ITU standard for interoperability in audio, video and data transmissions over IP; the world’s most widely used voice over IP (VoIP) communication protocol. It is now working on standards for telepresence systems, as well as on future-generation advanced multimedia systems (AMS).

SG 16 is responsible for standards enabling IPTV services and terminals, in the H.700-series. Some of them – ITU-T H.721, H.761 and H.762 – are already employed by millions of users in Asia.

The media gateway protocol family of standards in the H.248-series is also used worldwide in gateways, and especially for NGN. It allows the different functionalities needed for modern IP-based gateways to be added as needed, in modules ("H.248 packages") defined in ITU standards; thus maximizing flexibility, scalability and return-on-investment for network operators.

New standardization areas being explored include digital signage, ubiquitous sensor networks (USN), Internet of Things (IoT), home networking, and vehicular gateway aspects of intelligent transportation systems.