Developments and Trends in 2D and 3D Video Coding Standardization: HEVC and more
Jens-Rainer Ohm, Gary Sullivan, and Thomas Wiegand
Abstract
The main purpose of this tutorial is to give a profound insight into these emerging new technology trends, and additionally to point to further directions of improvements. It will consist of a technical review of recent developments in video coding standardization, including the HEVC standard and its prospective extensions for scalable coding and 3D video coding, recent and emerging extensions of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard supporting scalable video coding, 3D and multiview video coding, and background on H.264/MPEG-4 AVC itself.
Speakers
Jens-Rainer Ohm
Jens-Rainer Ohm received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in 1985, the Dr.-Ing. degree in 1990, and the habil. degree in 1997, all from Technical University of Berlin (TUB), Germany. From 1985 to 1995, he was a research and teaching assistant with the Institute of Telecommunications at TUB. Between 1992 and 2000, he has also served as lecturer on topics of digital image processing, coding and transmission at TUB. From 1996 to 2000, he was project manager/coordinator at the Image Processing Department of Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin. In 2000, he was appointed full professor and since then holds the chair position of the Institute of Communication Engineering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. His research and teaching activities cover the areas of motion-compensated, stereoscopic and 3-D image processing, multimedia signal coding and content description, transmission of video signals over mobile networks, as well as general topics of signal processing and digital communication systems.
Since 1998, he has participated in the work of the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG), where he has been contributing to the development of MPEG-4 (Video and AVC) and MPEG-7 standards. He has been the chairman of the ISO/IEC WG 11 (MPEG) Video Subgroup since May 2002. From January 2005 until November 2009, he was also co-chairing the Joint Video Team (JVT) of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T SG 16 VCEG. Currently, he is co-chairing the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) of ISO/IEC and ITU-T, with the mandate of developing the next generation of high-efficiency video coding technology.
Prof. Ohm has authored textbooks on multimedia signal processing, analysis and coding, on communications engineering and signal transmission, as well as numerous papers in the various fields mentioned above. He is member of various professional organizations including IEEE, VDE/ITG, EURASIP and AES.
Gary J. Sullivan
Gary J. Sullivan has held leadership positions in a number of video and image coding organizations since 1996, including chairmanship or co-chairmanship of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG), the video subgroup of the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), the ITU-T/ISO/IEC Joint Video Team (JVT), the JPEG XR subgroup of the ITU-T/ISO/IEC Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), and most recently the ITU-T/ISO/IEC Joint Collaborative Team for Video Coding (JCT-VC) for the development of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. He is best known for leading the development of the ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10 MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard from the inception of the project through several editions and extension efforts, including the Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt), Professional Profiles, Scalable Video Coding (SVC), and 3D / Stereo / Multiview Video Coding (MVC). He is a Video/Image Technology Architect in the Windows division of Microsoft Corporation. At Microsoft he has been the originator and lead designer of the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system. His research interests and areas of publication include image and video compression, rate-distortion optimization, motion estimation and compensation, scalar and vector quantization, and error/packet-loss resilient video coding.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE and SPIE. He has received the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Technical Field Award, the IEEE Consumer Electronics Engineering Excellence Award, the INCITS Technical Excellence Award, the IMTC Leadership Award, the J. B. Speed Professional Award in Engineering, the Microsoft Technical Achievement in Standardization Award, and the Microsoft Business Achievement in Standardization Award. The standardization projects that he led for development of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard have been recognized by an ATAS Primetime Emmy Engineering Award and a pair of NATAS Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards.
Sullivan holds B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Louisville, and Ph.D. and Engineers degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1999, he was the manager of Communications Core Research at PictureTel Corporation, a Howard Hughes Fellow and member of the technical staff in the Advanced Systems Division of the Hughes Aircraft Corporation, and an avionics software engineer at Texas Instruments.
Thomas Wiegand
Thomas Wiegand is a professor at the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Berlin Institute of Technology, chairing the Image Communication Laboratory, and is jointly heading the Image Processing department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications - Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1995 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 2000. He joined the Heinrich Hertz Institute in 2000 as the head of the Image Communication group in the Image Processing department. His research interests include video processing and coding, multimedia transmission, as well as computer vision and graphics.
From 1993 to 1994, he was a Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan. In 1995, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. From 1997 to 1998, he was a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University, USA and served as a consultant to 8x8, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA. From 2006-2008, he was a consultant to Stream Processors, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA. From 2007-2009, he was a consultant to Skyfire, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA. Since 2006, he has been a member of the technical advisory board of Vidyo, Inc., Hackensack, NJ, USA. He is a visiting professor to Stanford University for the period August 2011 - March 2012.
Since 1995, he has been an active participant in standardization for multimedia with successful submissions to ITU-T VCEG, ISO/IEC MPEG, 3GPP, DVB, and IETF. In October 2000, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur of ITU-T VCEG. In December 2001, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur / Co-Chair of the JVT. In February 2002, he was appointed as the Editor of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard and its extensions (FRExt and SVC). From 2005-2009, he was Co-Chair of MPEG Video.
In 1998, he received the SPIE VCIP Best Student Paper Award. In 2004, he received the Fraunhofer Award and the ITG Award of the German Society for Information Technology. The projects that he co-chaired for development of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard have been recognized by the 2008 ATAS Primetime Emmy Engineering Award and a pair of NATAS Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards. In 2009, he received the Innovations Award of the Vodafone Foundation, the EURASIP Group Technical Achievement Award, and the Best Paper Award of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. In 2010, he received the Eduard Rhein Technology Award. In 2011, he received the Best Paper Award of EURASIP, the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award and was elected Fellow of the IEEE. He is a recipient of the 2012 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Technical Field Award.