Thomas Wiegand


Thomas Wiegand is a German electrical engineer who substantially contributed to the creation of the H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC video coding standards. He has been elected to the German National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science.
For H.264/AVC, Wiegand was one of the chairmen of the Joint Video Team standardization committee that created the standard and was the chief editor of the standard itself. He was also a very active technical contributor to the H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC video coding standards. Wiegand also holds a chairmanship position in the ITU-T VCEG of ITU-T Study Group 16 and previously in ISO/IEC MPEG standardization organizations. In July 2006, video coding work of the ITU-T was jointly led by Gary J. Sullivan and Wiegand for the preceding six years. It was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history. Since 2018, Wiegand has served as chair of the ITU/WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health. Since 2014, Thomson Reuters named Wiegand in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” as one of the most cited researchers in his field.

Current work

Wiegand is Professor at Technische Universität Berlin and executive director of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He heads research teams working on:
  • Video processing and coding
  • Multimedia transmission
  • Machine learning
  • Mobile Communications
  • Computer Vision
Since 2020 he is a principal scientist at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data.

Early background

Thomas Wiegand was born in and spent his early life in East Germany. He decided to take an apprenticeship as an electrician instead of studying to avoid having to serve for three years in the National People's Army. After the "Wende" he started to study electrical engineering at the Hamburg University of Technology, where he earned his Diplom in 1995. In 2000, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. As a student, he was a visiting researcher at Kobe University, Japan, the University of California at Santa Barbara and Stanford University, US, where he also returned as a visiting professor.

Standardization