Michael J. Horowitz Explained

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

• A.B. degree with distinction in physics from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1986.
• M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University, New York, New York, 1988.
• Ph.D. in electrical engineering from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998.

Professional work

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

• 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

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. http://www.wainhouse.com/bulletin/archives04.html, Andrew W. Davis, "The Wainhouse Bulletin," Volume 4 Issue #8, February 2003.
5. Web site: IP Video Conferencing | Desktop Video Conferencing | Vidyo . 2014-01-07 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20090507210838/http://www.vidyo.com/news_products_012808.html . May 7, 2009 . mdy-all .
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. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/22/21231959/google-duo-update-video-call-quality-av1-codec, Nick Statt, "Google Duo video calls are about to look a whole lot better," The Verge, April 22, 2020.