AIDRC Seminar Series - Benjamin Bross

Title:

The new Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard - open implementations and applications

Abstract:

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the latest video coding standard released in mid-2020 as the successor to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Building upon substantially increased compression efficiency, the VVC standard offers increased versatility in terms of its usability for diverse applications compared to its predecessor standards. For instance, VVC already supports High Dynamic Range (HDR), Wide Color Gamut (WCG), resolution- and rate-adaptive streaming, 360-degree immersive video, scalability, and efficient encoding of screen content in its first version. Formal subjective verification tests have shown that VVC can provide about 45% of bit-rate savings compared to HEVC for the same perceived video quality with even higher savings around 50% for 4K High Dynamic Range and immersive video.

While VVC has been already adopted by the DVB ecosystem for broadcast and selected for TV 3.0, i.e. the next generation TV broadcast in Brazil, its integration in 3GPP for the 5G video delivery ecosystem has been evaluated highlighting its relevance for mobile applications. On the deployment side, first TV sets already she with integrated VVC decoders. Furthermore, Fraunhofer HHI has developed open-source and efficient software solutions for encoding and decoding with VVC, VVenC and VVdeC. VVenC allows highly scalable, efficient encoding in in the cloud whereas VVdeC enables playback of VVC video bitstreams in the browser and in mobile devices.

Bio:

Benjamin Bross received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, in 2008. In 2009, he joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications – Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany, where he is currently heading the Video Coding Systems group at the Video Communication & Applications Department and in 2011, he became a part-time lecturer at the HTW University of Applied Sciences Berlin. Since 2010, Benjamin is very actively involved in the ITU-T VCEG | ISO/IEC MPEG video coding standardization processes as a technical contributor, coordinator of core experiments and chief editor of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard [ITU-T H.265 | ISO/IEC 23008-2] and the new Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard [ITU-T H.266 | ISO/IEC 23090-3].

In addition to his involvement in standardization, his group is developing standard-compliant software implementations. This includes the development of an HEVC live software encoder that is currently deployed in broadcast for HD and UHD TV channels and most recently, the open and optimized VVC software implementations VVenC and VVdeC. Benjamin Bross is an author or co-author of several fundamental HEVC and VVC-related publications, and an author of two book chapters on HEVC and Inter-Picture Prediction Techniques in HEVC. He received the IEEE Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics – Berlin in 2013, the SMPTE Journal Certificate of Merit in 2014 and an Emmy Award at the 69th Engineering Emmy Awards in 2017 as part of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding for its development of HEVC.