Thomas Wiegand (electrical engineer)

Thomas Wiegand (2014)

Thomas Wiegand (born May 6, 1970 in Wismar ) is a German electrical engineer . He was involved in the development of the H.264 / MPEG-AVC and the H.265 / MPEG-HEVC video coding standards. He was one of the heads of the standardization bodies ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group ( VCEG ) and ISO / IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) Video and wrote the 280-page H.264 / MPEG-AVC specification as editor . In addition, he has contributed to the technical content of the H.264 / MPEG-AVC and H.265 / MPEG-HEVC video coding standards in more than 100 standardization proposals.

Life

Thomas Wiegand initially trained as an electrician during the GDR era . He then began studying electrical engineering at the Technical University of Wismar and in 1991, after completing his intermediate diploma, moved to the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg , where he graduated in 1995 as a qualified engineer. During his studies he was a visiting scholar at the University of Kobe 1993-1994 and the University of California, Santa Barbara 1995. During his stay at the University of California he began his work on video coding and transmission. He then became a research assistant at the chair for communications engineering at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and received his doctorate in 2000. During his doctorate from 1997–1998 he was a visiting scientist and from 2011 to 2012 he was a visiting professor at Stanford University.

In 2000 Wiegand was named a director of VCEG, in 2001 director of JVT, and in 2005 director of MPEG Video. In 2006 he was given responsibility for the ITU-T part of the JPEG standardization.

Wiegand has been a professor at the Technical University of Berlin since 2008 , where he heads the image communication department. At the same time, he and Martin Schell head the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI. From 2000 to 2008 he headed the image communication group and from 2008 to 2013, together with Ralf Schäfer, the image signal processing department.

His research interests lie in the areas of processing, coding and transmission of video signals, semantics in images and videos, representation, coding and transmission of 3D worlds.

Wiegand has made a number of scientific contributions to video coding and other subject areas and has made numerous proposals for the standardization of video coding at the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (ITU-T SG 16 Q.6: VCEG), the ISO / IEC Moving Pictures Experts Group (ISO / IEC JTC1 / SC29 / WG11 - MPEG) and contributed to the standardization of video transmission in 3GPP and DVB .

Awards

• 1998: SPIE VCIP Best Student Paper Award (together with Eckehard Steinbach, Peter Eisert and Bernd Girod)
• 2004: Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize (together with Detlev Marpe and Heiko Schwarz)
• 2004: Prize of the Information Technology Society (ITG) in the VDE (Germany) (together with Detlev Marpe and Heiko Schwarz)
• 2006: The work on video coding in the ITU-T, which has been jointly managed by Gary Sullivan and Thomas Wiegand since 2000, has been voted the most influential standardization topic of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history
• 2008: Primetime Emmy Engineering Award (together with the JVT standardization committee of the American Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for the development of the high profile of H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC , with Wiegand as Associated Rapporteur / Co-chair of the JVT , Editor of the standard and contributed with technical contributions)
• 2009: Daytime Emmy Technology & Engineering Award (together with the ITU-T VCEG and ISO / IEC MPEG from the American National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for H.264 , with Wiegand as Associated Rapporteur / Co-chair, Editor of the standard and contributed with technical contributions)
• 2009: Group Technical Achievement Award from the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) for contributions to research and standardization in video coding
• 2009: Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (together with Heiko Schwarz and Detlev Marpe)
• 2009: Innovation award from the Vodafone Foundation for research in mobile communication
• 2010: Technology Prize of the Eduard Rhein Foundation (together with Jens-Rainer Ohm )
• 2011: Fellow of the IEEE "for contributions to video coding and its standardization"
• 2011: Best Paper Award from the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) (together with Karsten Müller, Aljoscha Smolic, Kristina Dix, Philipp Merkle and Peter Kauff)
• 2011: Karl Heinz Beckurts Prize (together with Detlev Marpe and Heiko Schwarz)
• 2012: IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award (together with Gisle Bjontegaard and Gary J. Sullivan)
• 2013: Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (together with Gary J. Sullivan, Jens-Rainer Ohm and Woo-Jin Han)
• 2013: Best Journal Paper Award of the Multimedia Communications Technical Committee (MMTC) of the IEEE Communications Society (together with Patrick Ndjiki-Nya, Martin Koppel, Dimitar Doshkov, Haricharan Lakshman, Philipp Merkle and Karsten Müller)
• 2013: International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) Leadership Award
• 2013: Research Award for Technical Communication
• 2014: Best Paper Award from the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) (together with P. Merkle, Y. Morvan, A. Smolic, D. Farin, K. Müller, PHN de With)
• 2014: Richard Theile Medal of the Television and Cinema Technology Society (FKTG)
• 2014: "Germany's digital minds"
• 2015: ITU150 Award
• 2016: Member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering Acatech
• 2017: Primetime Emmy Engineering Award (together with the JCT-VC standardization group from the American Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for the development of the High Efficiency Video Coding - H.265 / MPEG-HEVC standard )
• 2018: Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
• 2019: Best Poster Presentation Paper Award, Picture Coding Symposium, Ningbo, China (PCS 2019) (together with Wang-Q Lim, Heiko Schwarz, Detlev Marpe)

various

• 1997–1998: Consultant for 8x8, Inc., Santa Clara, California, USA
• 2006–2011: Member of the Technical Advisory Board of Vidyo, Inc, Hackensack, New Jersey, USA
• 2006–2008: Member of the Technical Advisory Board of Stream Processors, Inc., Sunnyvale, California, USA
• 2007–2009: Member of the Technical Advisory Board of Skyfire, Inc., Mountain View, California, USA

Web links

• Member entry of Prof. Dr.-Ing Thomas Wiegand at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina
• Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications - Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI)
• Image processing at the HHI
• Homepage of Wiegand at the HHI

Individual evidence

1. ↑ itu.int ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Vodafone innovation award for Fraunhofer researchers. Press release from the Fraunhofer Institute on June 30, 2009
3. ↑ Technology Prize of the Eduard Rhein Foundation 2010 ( Memento of the original from September 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Germany's digital minds
5. ↑ ITU150 Awards