Towards a next generation video codec from the Alliance for Open Media - Debargha Mukherjee

Abstract

The Alliance for Open Media (AOM) is an industry consortium formed in 2015 to produce open royalty-free media formats for the web. In 2018, AOM produced its first specification AV1 - a competitive royalty-free video coding standard, that is widely used today by many video streaming services already and is expected to grow substantially in usage over time. However, AOM also started exploratory work towards a next generation codec in 2021, that is gradually reaching maturity. In this talk, we will present an overview of coding tools under consideration in the upcoming next-generation codec, and the current performance numbers. We will also discuss the viability and challenges in incorporating ML in modern video codecs, and what we are doing in AOM in this regard.
Bio

Debargha Mukherjee received his M.S./Ph.D. degrees in ECE from University of California Santa Barbara in 1999. Since 2010 he has been with Google LLC, where he is currently a Principal Engineer/Director leading next generation video codec research and development efforts. Prior to that he was with Hewlett Packard Laboratories, conducting research on video/image coding and processing. Debargha has made extensive research contributions in the area of image and video compression throughout his career, and was elected to IEEE Fellow for leadership in standard development for the video-streaming industry. He has (co-)authored about 150 papers on various signal processing topics, and holds more than 200 US patents, with many more pending. He currently serves as a Senior Area Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, and as a member of the IEEE Visual Signal Processing and Communications Technical Committee (VSPC-TC).