Biography
Thomas Schierl received the Diplom-Ingenieur degree (passed with distinction) in Computer Engineering from the Berlin University of Technology (TUB), Germany in December 2003 and the Doktor der Ingenieurwissenschaften (Dr.-Ing.) degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (passed with distinction) from Berlin University of Technology (TUB) in October 2010.
Since 2010, Thomas is head of the research group Multimedia Communications in the Image Processing Department at Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), Berlin. Before Thomas was responsible as Senior Researcher for various scientific as well as Industry-funded research projects in the Image Processing department of Dr. Ralf Schäfer and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Wiegand at HHI.
Since 2015, Thomas is heading together with Detlev Marpe the new department Video Coding & Analytics at Fraunhofer HHI. The new department is covering all research groups of the former Image Processing Department with a relation to video coding, communications and analytics.
Thomas is the co-author of various IETF RFCs, beside others he is author of the IETF RTP Payload Formats for H.264 SVC as well as for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC aka H.265).
In the ISO/IEC MPEG group, Thomas is as co-editor responsible for e.g. the MPEG-2 Transport Stream standards on transport of H.264 SVC, MVC and MPEG-HEVC / ITU-T Rec. H.265. Thomas is also a co-editor of the AVC File Format.
Typically, he is participating standardization meetings such as JCT, MPEG, IETF, 3GPP or DVB meetings.
Thomas and his team – as part of JCT-VC – also contributed to the standardization process of MPEG - HEVC / ITU-T Rec. H.265, mainly in the area of high level parallelism and high level syntax.
In 2007, Thomas visited the Image, Video, and Multimedia Systems group of Prof. Bernd Girod at Stanford University, CA, USA for different research activities.
Thomas' research interests include video over wireless, system integration of video codecs as well as protocols for cellular networks.
In 2014, Thomas received together with the ISO/IEC JCT1/SC29/WG11 Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) the Technology and Engineering Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for the Development of the MPEG-2 Transport Stream.
Main Research Topics
5GXR
We explore ways to efficiently stream volumetric videos over 5G networks. Our work focuses on development of a volumetric video streaming system that offloads the rendering to a powerful cloud/edge server and only sends the rendered 2D view to the client instead of the full volumetric content.
VVC High-Level Syntax
Considerable progress has been made in the field of video coding [e.g., versatile video coding (VVC)] for the purpose of improving compression efficiency (e.g., reducing the amount of data needed to store or transmit a video). Just as relevant, however, is the progress that has been made in enabling video applications through design of the codec high-level syntax and the system integration.
5G Predictive HARQ
HARQ is a physical layer mechanism provides retransmissions based on the feedback to increase robustness. Predicitve HARQ focuses on providing the HARQ feedback earlier by predicting the decoding outcome, designated as Early HARQ (E-HARQ).