Tutorials

Tutorial title: Recent Advances in Video Coding

Author: Thomas Wiegand

Affiliation: Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Berlin, Germany

Tutorial outline:

With the introduction of H.264/AVC, significant improvements have recently been demonstrated in video compression capability. These advances have been brought about by improvements in signal processing techniques along with a relaxation of the bounds on practical computing power. While H.264/AVC has found its way into numerous transmission and storage applications spanning the range from smallest (Mobiles, iPod) to largest video resolutions (HDTV, Blu-Ray, HD DVD), new techniques are being developed and standardized.

One new extension of H.264/AVC is called Scalable Video Coding (SVC) allowing partial transmission and decoding of a bitstream resulting in lower temporal or spatial resolutions or reduced quality. SVC provides functionalities such as graceful degradation in lossy transmission environments as well as bit rate, format, and power adaptation. These functionalities provide enhancements to transmission applications such as video streaming over 3GPP mobile, ad-hoc and peer-to-peer networks as well as video conferencing.

Another new extension of H.264/AVC is called Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) to efficiently represent video signals simultaneously acquired by multiple cameras. MVC aims at applications such as 3D Television and Free Viewpoint Video. These new applications enable new user experiences including stereoscopic and head motion parallax viewing as well as free viewpoint navigation through scenes.

The tutorial will cover the following:
- H.264/AVC
    - History
    - Technology
    - Performance
    - Profiles
- SVC
    - History
    - Technolgy
    - Performance
    - Video transmission with SVC
    - Profiles
- MVC
    - History
    - Technology
    - Potential applications

Author information:



Thomas Wiegand is the head of the Image Communication Group in 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. His research interest include video processing and coding, multimedia transmission, semantic image representation, 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. He is currently a member of the technical advisory boards of the two start-up companies Layered Media, Inc., Rochelle Park, NJ, USA and Stream Processors, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA.
Since 1995, he is 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/AVC video coding standard and its extensions (FRExt and SVC). In January 2005, he was appointed as Associated Chair of MPEG Video.
In 1998, he received the SPIE VCIP Best Student Paper Award. In 2004, he received the Fraunhofer Award for outstanding scientific achievements in solving application related problems and the ITG Award of the German Society for Information Technology. Since January 2006, he is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.