Thomas Wiegand (born 6 May 1970 in
Wismar) is a German
electricalengineer who substantially contributed to the creation of the
H.264/AVC,
H.265/HEVC, and
H.266/VVC video coding standards. For
H.264/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 a very active technical contributor to the
H.264/AVC,
H.265/HEVC, and
H.266/VVC video coding standards. Wiegand also holds a chairmanship position in the
ITU-TVCEG of
ITU-T Study Group 16 and previously in
ISO/
IECMPEG standardization organizations. In July 2006, video coding work of the ITU-T was jointly led by Gary J. Sullivan and Wiegand for the preceding six years. It was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history.[1] Since 2018, Wiegand has served as chair of the
ITU/
WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health (FG-AI4H).[2] Since 2014, Thomson Reuters named Wiegand in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” as one of the most cited researchers in his field.
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)
Since 2018: Chair of the
ITU/
WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health (FG-AI4H)[5]
Awards
1998:
SPIE VCIP Best Student Paper Award (together with Eckehard Steinbach, Peter Eisert and
Bernd Girod)
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
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)[6]
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)[7]
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: 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
2019: Best Poster Presentation Paper Award, Picture Coding Symposium, Ningbo, China (PCS 2019) (together with Wang-Q Lim, Heiko Schwarz, Detlev Marpe)
2022: EURASIP Best Paper Award for the Signal Processing: Image Communication Journal (together with R. Reisenhofer, S. Bosse, G. Kutyniok)
2022: Fellow of the Information Technology Society in VDE (ITG) 2022, for his "outstanding achievements in the field of communications and information technology, noted by the entire professional community, in conjunction with [his] commitment to our professional society."