Biography
Robert Skupin received his Dipl.-Ing. (FH) degree in electrical engineering from H-BRS in St. Augustin, Germany in 2009 and his M.S. degree in computer engineering from Technische Universität Berlin, Germany in 2014. He has been with the Multimedia Communications Group in the Video Communication and Applications Department of the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institute in Berlin, Germany since 2009.
His research interests lie in the area of efficient coding, storage and transport of traditional video data as well as emerging formats in AR/VR. He co-authored many publications in this area and contributed roughly 200 related standardisation documents to H.265/HEVC, its scalable extensions and, recently, H.266/VVC as well as related system standards such as the ISO Base Media File Format, MPEG-2 Transport Stream and the Omnidirectional MediA Format. He also contributed to various scientific and industry-funded research projects such as SVConS and COAST in the EU FP7 program and the German BMBF project CODEPAN.
Main Research Topics
Versatile Video Coding (VVC)
Versatile Video Coding (VVC - officially approved as ITU-T H.266 | 23090-3) is the most recent international video-compression standard of ITU-T and ISO/IEC. It was developed by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) with significant contributions from Fraunhofer HHI’s Video Communication and Applications department. Compared to its predecessor H.265/HEVC, VVC achieves about 50% bit-rate reduction at the same subjective video quality for a wide range of video content and applications.
VVC High-level Syntax and System Integration
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.
360° Video - MPEG-OMAF
The MPEG-OMAF standard (officially ISO/IEC 23090-2) is the first international standard for storage and distribution of 360° Video, with significant contributions from Fraunhofer HHI’s Video Coding and Analytics department. OMAF specifies tile-based streaming of 360° Video which allows for significantly higher resolution at the end device.