Michael J. Horowitz (born January 2, 1964, in Ames, Iowa) is an American electrical engineer who actively participated in the creation of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and H.265/HEVC video coding standards. He is co-inventor of flexible macroblock ordering (FMO) [1] and tiles,[2] essential features in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and H.265/HEVC, respectively. He is managing partner of Applied Video Compression and has served on the technical advisory boards of Vivox, Inc., Vidyo, Inc., and RipCode, Inc.

Education edit

Professional work edit

Horowitz also has contributed to the early productization of several video coding standards:

  • 2000 – At Polycom, architect and developer of the first commercially available in-product implementation of macroblock-adaptive multiple reference frames (H.263 Annex U).[3] Macroblock-adaptive multiple reference frames has become a mainstay in subsequent video coding standards.
  • 2003 – At Polycom, architect and lead engineer of the team that produced the first commercially available in-product implementation of H.264/AVC.[4]
  • 2008 – At Vidyo, architect and lead engineer of the team that developed the first commercially available in-product implementation of H.264 SVC[5]
  • 2012 – At eBrisk Video, architect and lead engineer of the team that developed one of the first commercially available implementations of H.265/HEVC.[6]
  • 2020 – At Google, Technical Lead of the AV1 for Duo project that became the first commercially available real-time interactive video implementation of AV1.[7]

Standardization edit

  • 2001-2002 – VCEG Chair, Ad hoc Group on H.26L Complexity Reduction
  • 2002-2003 – JVT Chair, Ad hoc Group on H.26L Complexity Reduction
  • 2002-2003 – JVT Chair, Ad hoc Group on Robustness
  • 2008-2010 – VCEG Chair, Ad hoc Group on Computational Efficiency
  • 2011-2012 – JCT-VC Chair, Ad hoc Group on High-level Parallelism
  • 2020 – Alliance for Open Media Co-chair, RTC Subgroup

References edit

  1. ^ United States Patent 7,239,662
  2. ^ United States Patent 9,060,174
  3. ^ Wiegand, T., Girod, B. “Multi-frame motion-compensated prediction for video transmission”, page xi, Springer, 2001.
  4. ^ Andrew W. Davis, "The Wainhouse Bulletin," Volume 4 Issue #8, February 2003.
  5. ^ "IP Video Conferencing | Desktop Video Conferencing | Vidyo". Archived from the original on May 7, 2009. Retrieved January 7, 2014.
  6. ^ Horowitz, M., Kossentini, F., Mahdi, N., Xu, S., Guermazi H., Tmar, H., Li B., Sullivan, G. J., Xu, J., "Informal subjective quality comparison of video compression performance of the HEVC and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standards for low-delay applications”, Proc. SPIE 8499, Applications of Digital Image Processing XXXV, October 15, 2012.
  7. ^ Nick Statt, "Google Duo video calls are about to look a whole lot better," The Verge, April 22, 2020.