| Hannuksela refines Emmy Award-winning video technology in Tampere |
17.03.2009 14:44 |
The Joint Video Team standard development project recently received two Emmy Awards for Technology and Engineering thanks to the technical merits of the Advanced Video Coding standard (H.264/AVC) developed by the team. MSc Miska M. Hannuksela who works at Nokia Research Center, Tampere, participated actively in the Joint Video Team and in the development of the award-winning H.264/AVC standard.
The Advanced Video Coding standard (H.264/AVC) is used in most new digital video systems, including high-definition and mobile television broadcasting, Blu-ray discs, and many Internet video formats, such as the YouTube high-definition videos and the Adobe Flash format. The H.264/AVC standard developed by the Joint Video Team requires about half the data rate and storage space compared with the previous standard (MPEG-2) currently used in digital television and DVDs. The team headed by Hannuksela authored the greatest number of technical contributions adopted into the H.264/AVC standard (about 20 percent of all adopted contributions). Furthermore, he had a major role in the standardization of the encapsulation protocol for transmitting H.264/AVC content over the Internet.
“Many visible errors encountered during video playback are caused by transmission errors, which are inherent in the Internet, wireless networks, and broadcast networks” says Hannuksela. His PhD thesis that will be publicly examined at Tampere University of Technology (TUT) reviews methods for protecting H.264/AVC video streams from transmission errors and presents novel methods for improving the error robustness of H.264/AVC, resulting in a more pleasant video experience for the user. Support for the proposed methods has been included into the H.264/AVC standard or the protocol for transmitting H.264/AVC streams over the Internet. In addition, he proposes a novel method, adopted into H.264/AVC, which improves compression efficiency of the standard up to 20 percent. “This will further decrease the required data rate and storage”, adds Hannuksela.
The Joint Video Team is a group of video coding experts from ITU (International Telecommunication Union) the International Standardisation Organisation and the International Electrotechnical Commission created to develop an advanced video coding specification. In August 2008, the team was awarded with a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS) and in January 2009 the team received the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) for accomplishments in the field of video and broadcasting technology.
Public defence of a Doctoral dissertation on 23 March
The Doctoral dissertation of MSc Miska M. Hannuksela in the field of signal processing “Error-Resilient Communication Using the H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard” will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering of Tampere University of Technology (TUT) on Monday, 23 March at 12.00 in room TB111 in the Tietotalo building (address: Korkeakoulunkatu 1, Tampere, Finland).
The opponents will be Professor Fernando Pereira (Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal) and Dr. Nikolaus Färber (Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen, Erlangen, Germany). Professor Moncef Gabbouj from the Department of Signal Processing at TUT will act as Chairman.
Miska M. Hannuksela comes from Kangasala, Finland and works as a Research Leader at Nokia Research Center.
Leading experts in video compression technology coming to TUT
One of the opponents, Professor Fernando Pereira is one of the world’s leading experts in video compression technology and has co-authored a book on the MPEG-4 video coding standard. The other opponent, Dr Nikolaus Färber works at Fraunhofer Research Institute where, among others, the MP3 format was developed.
There is a very good chance that Hannuksela’s dissertation will be awarded with honors that is granted to highly accomplished dissertations only.
Further information:
Miska M. Hannuksela, tel. +358 7180 73151, miska.hannuksela@nokia.com,
http://research.nokia.com/people/miska_hannuksela/
The dissertation is available at:
http://URN.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-200903121043
News submitted by: Anna Naukkarinen
News updated by: ***
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