University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Technical University of Hamburg
Thomas wiegand 150 laureate interview
Thomas Wiegand (born 6 May 1970 in Wismar) is a German electrical engineer who substantially contributed to the creation of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and H.265/MPEG-H HEVC video coding standards. For H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, Wiegand was one of the chairmen of the Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization committee that created the standard and was the chief editor of the standard itself. He was also an active technical contributor to both standards. Wiegand also holds a chairmanship position in the ITU-T VCEG and previously in ISO/IEC MPEG standardization organizations. In July 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 the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history.
Itu interviews prof dr ing thomas wiegand fraunhofer heinrich hertz institute
Current work
Wiegand is Professor at the Technical University of Berlin and executive director of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. At both institutions, he heads research teams working on
Video processing and coding
Multimedia transmission
Semantic approaches in image processing
Coding, interactive streaming, and visualization of 3D environments
Early background
Thomas Wiegand was born in and spent his early life in East Germany, where he decided to make an apprenticeship as an electrician instead of studying, because everyone who wanted to go to the university had to serve for three years in the National People's Army which he chose to avoid. After the "Wende" he started to study electrical engineering at the Technical University of Hamburg, where he earned his Diplom in 1995. In the same year Wiegand stayed for some time as a guest scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2000 he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Standardization
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)
2005-2009: Associated Chair of MPEG Video (Moving Pictures Experts Group - ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11)
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)
2006: The video coding work of the ITU-T led by Gary Sullivan and Thomas Wiegand jointly since 2000 was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history
2008: Primetime Emmy Engineering Award (awarded to the JVT standards committee by the Academy of Television Arts and 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)
2009: Paired Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards (one awarded to VCEG and one to MPEG by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for development of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard)
2009: Group Technical Achievement Award of EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) for active contributions to video coding research and standardization activities
2009: Best Paper Award of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (together with Heiko Schwarz and Detlev Marpe)
2009: Innovation Award of Vodafone Foundation for Research in Mobile Communications
2010: Technology Award of 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 of EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) (together with Karsten Müller, Aljoscha Smolic, Kristina Dix, Philipp Merkle and Peter Kauff)
2011: Karl Heinz Beckurts Award (together with Heiko Schwarz and Detlev Marpe)
2013: Best Paper Award of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (together with Gary Sullivan, Jens-Rainer Ohm, and Woo-Jin Han)
2013: Best Journal Paper Award of the IEEE Communications Society MMTC (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 of Alcatel Lucent Foundation
2014: Best Paper Award of EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) (together with P. Merkle, Y. Morvan, A. Smolic, D. Farin, K. Müller and P.H.N. de With)
2014: Richard Theile Medal of the German Television and Cinema Technology Society
