research: MPEG-AI Part 6 requirement mapping — the one square with a deadline #88

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research: MPEG-AI Part 6 requirement mapping — the one square with a deadline ...

ISO/IEC 23888-6 (Media authenticity and provenance indication) is scoped to
system-level media authentication across the entire lifecycle — authoring,
creation, production, editing, storage, delivery, playback — on MPEG Systems
technologies. CfP approved by WG 2 at MPEG 155; responses due as input
contributions to MPEG 157 (Brisbane) on 13 January 2027, then CD at 158, DIS at
159, FDIS early 2028. A contribution accepted in January has about a year of
drafting influence before the text sets.

WHY THIS IS NOT ALREADY COVERED. WAI's provenance ingest is authoring-side
manifest provenance — who made an asset and how, bound by hash. That is a
different layer from a delivery-and-playback authenticity specification. Treating
the existing ingest as coverage would be a category error: an authoring manifest
says what happened BEFORE distribution; this work item is about what can be
asserted and checked DURING it.

WHAT WAI HAS THAT THE REQUIREMENTS SPACE DOES NOT. Two positions absent from
every provenance standard in the survey, both sitting inside a lifecycle-scoped
authenticity spec: per-object MEASURED energy with a declared acquisition class
(provenance standards record what was done and by whom; none records what it
cost, as measured, with the provenance of the measurement stated), and
determinism tiers separating byte-exact reconstruction from approximate
re-rendering (a hard hash over rendered output is only meaningful when the
reconstruction is pinned). Both map to the delivery and playback stages an
authoring manifest never reaches.

THE ASYMMETRY. The downside of silence is not neutral. If this lands as THE
systems-layer provenance format, WAI is either a profile of it or an alternative
to it — and which one is decided by whether alignment work happened, not by
whether a contribution was submitted. Alignment is cheap and reversible; being an
alternative to a ratified systems-layer standard is neither.

Deliberately a research document rather than an extension. There is no bitstream,
no format and no capability string to register — the correct near-term action is
requirement-mapping plus a membership path, and §6 states plainly that this
claims no contribution, no membership, and no endorsement. Submitting requires SC
29 national-body membership, which is an organisational decision with a lead time
against a fixed date.

Ingest queue item 13 (#80 §6.5).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>

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