Technologiepreis - Technology Award 2010

Both award winners have significantly contributed to the H.264/AVC standard by their scientific visions, development of technical solutions and by participating in the management team responsible for the standard’s development.

By his early work after 1990, Jens-Rainer Ohm has proven that the usage of hierarchical motion-compensated frame structures in video coding can provide advantages with regard to compression performance compared to the conventional frame-recursive and bi-directional structures used mostly around that time. Further on, he showed that due to the limited error propagation of hierarchical structures, they could efficiently be used for scalable coding of video. Such structures are now a core element of H.264/AVC, as well as its scalable and multi-view extensions.

In the late 1990s, Dr. Ohm together with his group at HHI has applied methods of depthcontrolled view adaptation in the area of stereoscopic / 3D video signal processing and coding, extending methods of image-based rendering to video signals for the first time. It was shown that coding of depth maps in combination with such methods could give significant bit rate savings compared to separate or combined compression of stereo or multi-camera video. Further, the capability of display-adaptive stereo baseline width, which is necessary for optimum user experience, can easily be achieved by such methods.

Since 2000, Prof. Ohm and his group at RWTH Aachen were continuously involved in international video standardization, e.g. by proposing transforms with variable block size in H.264/AVC. In his role as MPEG video chair since 2002 and JVT co-chair since 2005 he has actively helped to initiate new developments such as the scalable and multi-view extensions of H.264/AVC, which include many concepts from the early works described above.

Since 1992, Dr. Ohm was teaching the topic of image and video compression at TU Berlin, giving the first specialized lecture within Germany on that subject. By this and the German textbook ''Digitale Bildcodierung'' written on the basis of the lecture, many young engineers in the country have been attracted to the scientific work in this field.

Thomas Wiegand has been a contributor to the field of video coding from the very beginning of his scientific career. In 1995, as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he successfully combined Lagrangian optimization techniques with hybrid video coding. Continuing his research as a PhD student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, he investigated the idea of multiple reference pictures for motion compensation. He iteratively coupled Lagrangian techniques with video codec design for the first time. Wiegand submitted the two main approaches of his PhD thesis to the standardization of H.263 and H.26L (the predecessor of H.264/AVC), where they are still present in the standard and reference software. His PhD thesis has been published later as a book with its foreword written by Gary J. Sullivan (at the time chair of video standardization in ISO/EC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG): ''This body of work by Thomas Wiegand and Bernd Girod has already proved to have an exceptional degree of influence in the video technology community, and I have personally been in a position to proudly witness much of that influence''.

In 2000, after finishing his dissertation work, Wiegand joined the Heinrich Hertz Institute as chair of the Image Communication group. Since them, he continued his research in video coding and successfully extended his areas of work towards multimedia networking, semantic image representations, and coding of 3D visual data.

Together with his team at the HHI, with particularly strong contributions of Detlev Marpe and Heiko Schwarz, he was in the position to actively contribute to all phases of H.264/AVC standardization:

 
 

Prof. Dr Hans-Joachim Grallert Heinrich Hertz Institute Fraunhofer Society, Berlin