Guest Editorial Special Section on Recent Standardization Efforts for Learning-Based Visual Data Coding

Visual data coding is an enabling technology for various applications and is now ubiquitously adopted in modern image processing, communications, and computer vision systems. To enable interoperability between devices manufactured and services provided by different enterprises, a series of standards targeting visual data coding have been crafted in the past three decades. Several standardization organizations, such as ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 consisting of Joint Picture Experts Group (JPEG) and Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG),
1
ITU-T SG 16 Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG),
2
IEEE Data Compression Standards Committee Audio Video Coding Working Group (1857 WG),
3
MPAI Community,
4
have been creating these standards from many contributions of academia and industry. While most of these visual coding standards have been successfully deployed in many applications, there are more challenges nowadays, especially to accommodate the large volume of visual data in limited storage and limited bandwidth transmission links. Compression efficiency improvements are still needed, especially considering emerging data representation formats ranging from 8K/HDR image/video to rich plenoptic data.