Thomas Wiegand

Thomas Wiegand (born 6 May 1970 in Wismar) is a German electrical engineer who actively participated in the creation of the H.264/AVC video coding standard. He was one of the chairmen of the standardization committee (Joint Video Team (JVT) and the editor of the standard itself (and he remains active in those roles). He was also an active technical contributor to the standard.

Wiegand also holds chairmanship positions in the ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG standardization organizations. In July of 2006, the video coding work of the ITU-T jointly led by Gary J. Sullivan and Wiegand for the preceding six years was voted as [http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/newslog/Video+Coding+Work+Voted+Most+Influential.aspx the most influential area] of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history.

Wiegand is Professor at the Technical University of Berlin and head of the Image Processing Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications – Heinrich Hertz Institute ( [http://www.hhi.de] ), Berlin, Germany. At both institutions, he is heading research teams ( [http://ip.hhi.de/imagecom_G1/research.htm] ) working on
* Video processing and coding
* Multimedia transmission
* Semantic approaches in image processing
* Coding, interactive streaming, and visualization of 3D environments

Education

* 1995: Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from Hamburg University of Technology, Germany
* 2000: Dr.-Ing. degree from University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.

tandardization

* Since 2000: Associated Rapporteur of VCEG (Video Coding Experts Group - ITU-T SG16 Q.6)
* Since 2001: Associated Rapporteur / Co-Chair of JVT
* Since 2002: Editor of the H.264/AVC video coding standard and its extensions (FRExt and SVC)
* Since 2005: Associated Chair of MPEG Video (Moving Pictures Experts Group - ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11)

Awards

* 1998: SPIE VCIP Best Student Paper Award
* 2004: Fraunhofer Award (together with Detlev Marpe and Heiko Schwarz)
* 2004: ITG Award of the German Society for Information Technology (together with Detlev Marpe and Heiko Schwarz)
* 2008: Primetime Emmy Engineering Award (awarded to the JVT standards committee by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for development of the High Profile of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, for which Wiegand served as associated rapporteur/co-chair, editor, and technical contributor)

Other

* 1993–1994: Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan
* 1995: Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, U.S.
* 1997–1998: Visiting Researcher at Stanford University, California, USA
* 1997–1998: Consultant to 8x8, Inc., Santa Clara, California, USA
* Since 2006: Member of technical advisory board of Vidyo, Inc, Hackensack, New Jersey, USA
* Since 2006: Member of technical advisory board of Stream Processors, Inc., Sunnyvale, California, USA

References

* http://iphome.hhi.de/wiegand