First IEEE Workshop on Coding for Machines

Multimedia signals – speech, audio, images, video, point clouds, light fields, … – have traditionally been acquired, processed, and compressed for human use. However, it is estimated that in the near future, the majority of Internet connections will be machine-to-machine (M2M). So, increasingly, the data communicated across networks is primarily intended for automated machine analysis. Applications include remote monitoring, surveillance, and diagnostics, autonomous driving and navigation, smart homes / buildings / neighborhoods / cities, and so on. This necessitates rethinking of traditional compression and pre-/post-processing methods to facilitate efficient machine-based analysis of multimedia signals. As a result, standardization efforts such as MPEG VCM (Video Coding for Machines) and JPEG AI have been launched.

Both the theory and early design examples have shown that significant bit savings for a given inference accuracy are possible compared to traditional human-oriented coding approaches. However, a number of open issues remain. These include a thorough understanding of the tradeoffs involved in coding for machines, coding for multiple machine tasks, as well as combined human-machine use, model architectures, software and hardware optimization, error resilience, privacy, security, and others. The proposed workshop is intended to bring together researchers from academia, industry, and government who are working on related problems, provide a snapshot of the current research and standardization efforts in the area, and generate ideas for future work. We welcome papers on the following and related topics:

• Theories and frameworks for coding for machines

• Standards related to coding for machines

• Methods for feature compression

• End-to-end approaches for coding for machines

• Compression for human-and-machine use

• Compressed-domain multimedia analysis (understanding, translation, classification, object detection, segmentation, pose estimation, etc.)

• Compressed-domain multimedia processing (denoising, super-resolution, enhancement, …)

• Datasets for coding for machines

• Error resilience in coding for machines

• Privacy and security in coding for machines