The Joint Video Team (JVT) standard development project is a joint project of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) for the development of a new video coding standard. The JVT project was created in December of 2001 to take over the work previously under way in the ITU-T H.26L project of VCEG and create a final design for standardization in both the ITU-T and MPEG. The main goals of the JVT/H.26L standardization effort are the definition of a simple and straightforward video coding design to achieve enhanced compression performance and provision of a "network-friendly" packet-based video representation addressing "conversational" (i.e., video telephony) and "non-conversational" (i.e., storage, broadcast, or streaming) applications. Hence, the JVT/H.26L design covers a Video Coding Layer (VCL), which provides the core high-compression representation of the video picture content, and a Network Adaptation Layer (NAL), which packages that representation for delivery over each distinct class of networks. The VCL design has achieved a significant improvement in rate-distortion efficiency - providing nearly a factor of two in bit-rate savings against existing standards. The NAL designs are being developed to transport the coded video data over existing and future networks such as circuit-switched wired networks, MPEG-2/H.222.0 transport streams, IP networks with RTP packetization, and 3G wireless systems.

This tutorial covers the most important issues regarding H.26L including:

• JVT/H.26L History, Structure, Goals, Applications
• Principles of video coding
• Video Coding Layer (Entropy Coding, Motion Compensation, Residual and Intra Coding, Quantization and Deblocking filter)
• Image and video coding efficiency
• Network Adaptation Layer (Slices, Data Partitioning)
• Efficiency for Internet and wireless transmission
• Implementation and design aspects including fast algorithms and hardware design
• Rate and coder control

Thomas Wiegand is the head of the Image Communication Group in the Image Processing Department of the Heinrich Hertz Institute Berlin, Germany. He received the Dr.-Ing. degree from University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 2000 and the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1995. From 1993 to 1994, he was a Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan. In 1995, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA, where he started his research on video compression and transmission. Since then he has published several conference and journal papers on the subject and has contributed successfully to the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (ITU-T SG16 Q.6) standardization efforts. From 1997 to 1998, he has been a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University, USA, and served as a consultant to 8x8, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA. In cooperation with 8x8, Inc., he holds two US patents in the area of video compression. In October 2000, he has been appointed as Associated Rapporteur of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group. In December 2001, he has been appointed as Associated Rapporteur / Co-Chair of the Joint Video Team (JVT) that has been created by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Experts Group (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11) for finalization of the JVT/H.26L video coding standard. He is also appointed as the editor of the JVT/H.26L video coding standard. His research interests include image compression, communication and signal processing as well as vision and computer graphics.

Gary J. Sullivan is a program manager for video technologies and standards in the Windows eHome Platforms group at Microsoft Corporation. He received his Ph.D. and Engineer degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1991. He has been the Rapporteur of Advanced Video Coding in the ITU-T and the leader of its Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) (ITU-T SG16 Q.6) for about six years. He was then appointed in March of 2001 as the chairman of the video work in the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11). Bringing the efforts of these two organizations together, he was most recently appointed in December of 2001 as the chairman of the Joint Video Team (JVT) between VCEG and MPEG for the finalization of the new JVT/H.26L video coding standard, which is targeted for final approval around the end of 2002. He is also the editor of ITU-T Recommendation H.263, and he was the chief editor and chairman for the recent H.263+ and H.263++ projects for enhancement of that standard. At Microsoft Corporation, he has been the lead designer of the DirectX^® Video Acceleration API/DDI feature of the Microsoft Windows^® operating system platform. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1999, he was the Manager of Communication Core Research at PictureTel Corporation, the quondam world leader in videoconferencing communication. He was previously a Howard Hughes Fellow and Member of the Technical Staff in the Advanced Systems Division of Hughes Aircraft Corporation and was a terrain-following radar system software engineer for Texas Instruments. His research interests and areas of publication include image and video compression, rate-distortion optimization, motion representation, scalar and vector quantization, error and packet loss resilient video coding, digital cinema, and video streaming.