A Technical Overview of VP9—The Latest Open-Source Video Codec

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Publisher: SMPTE — White Plains, NY, USA
Doc Type: Journal Article
Content Type: Original Research
Abbreviated Title: SMPTE Mot. Imag J.
Volume: 124, No. 1, pp. 44–54
Abstract: Google has recently finalized a next-generation open-source video codec called VP9, as part of the libvpx repository of the WebM project (http://www.webmproject.org/). Starting from the VP8 video codec released by Google in 2010 as the baseline, various enhancements and new tools were added, resulting in the next-generation bit stream VP9. The bit stream was finalized with the exception of essential bug fixes in June 2013. Prior to the release, however, all technical developments were being conducted openly in the public experimental branch of the repository for many months. This paper provides a brief technical overview of the coding tools included in VP9, along with coding performance comparisons with other state-of-the-art video codecs—namely, H.264/AVC and HEVC—on standard test sets. While a completely fair comparison is impossible to conduct because of the limitations of the respective encoder implementations, the tests show VP9 to be quite competitive with mainstream state-of-the-art codecs.
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
DOI: 10.5594/j18499
ISSN: Print: 1545-0279 | Electronic: 2160-2492
Link: https://doi.org/10.5594/j18499
Author(s): Debargha Mukherjee
bio
Debargha Mukherjee received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1995 and 1999, respectively. Between 1999 and 2010, he worked at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, conducting research on video and image coding and processing. Since 2010, he has been with Google Inc., where he is currently involved with open-source video codec development. Before that he worked in YouTube on video quality control and 2D to 3D conversion. Mukherjee has authored more than 75 papers on various signal processing topics and holds more than 20 US patents. He was a student paper award winner at IEEE ICIP in 1998; a keynote speaker at the SPIE Stereoscopic Displays and Applications conference, and the CVPR 3D Cinematography workshop, both in 2012. Mukherjee currently serves as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and the SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging.
Jingning Han
bio
Jingning Han received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2007, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2008 and 2012, respectively. He is currently with the WebM Codec Team at Google Inc., in Mountain View, CA, where he is involved in video compression, processing, and related technologies. His research interests include video coding and computer architecture. Han was a recipient of the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Awards from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara, in 2010 and 2011, a Dissertation Fellowship in 2012, and the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo in 2012.
Jim Bankoski
bio
Jim Bankoski is an engineering director working on Google's WebM project. He is the former CTO of On2 Technologies, and a technical contributor to all of On2's and later Google's codecs from Tm2x through VP9, including video codecs widely used in Flash and Skype and now WebM.
Ronald Bultje
bio
Ronald S. Bultje received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2011. He then joined Google's video codec design team, where he contributed to the design and release of VP9. Since 2013, he has worked for Two Sigma Investments in New York. Bultje has also contributed to open source video technology projects, most notably FFmpeg (since 2002), and still does so today.
Adrian Grange
bio
Adrian Grange joined Google in its acquisition of On2 Technologies where he had worked since 2000. He has contributed to the development of each version of the VPx codec from VP3 to VP9. Previously, he worked on several digital TV and set-top box projects, wrote an MHEG5 engine for a UK Freeview terrestrial TV project, and developed computer vision algorithms for a high-speed industrial inspection system for the ceramic tile market.
John Koleszar
bio
John Koleszar joined On2 Technologies in 2005, where he worked as an engineer on codec development and optimization for numerous embedded systems. After joining Google in 2010, he focused on deployment of the VP8 codec, and research and design of VP9 for the WebM Project. Koleszar is currently working to deliver Internet video from new heights as a member of the Project Loon avionics software team. He holds a B.S. degree in computer systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Paul Wilkins
bio
Paul Wilkins graduated from Cambridge University in 1986 and has been working in the field of video compression since the early 1990s. Before joining On2 Technologies Inc. in 1999, he developed a video codec that was later released as VP3 (the basis of the open source codec Theora). He served as On2's director of research and development and later as co-chief technology officer (with Jim Bankoski), and was instrumental in the development of all the company's subsequent video codecs. In 2010, On2 was acquired by Google and Wilkins took on a new role as technical lead for codec development within the WebM team.
Yaowu Xu
bio
Yaowu Xu is currently a technical lead manager at Google, working on video codec development. Before joining Google, he was the vice president of codec development at On2 Technologies, where he was involved in the development of On2's VPx series of video codecs, including VP3.2, VP4, VP5, VP6, VP7 and VP8. These video codecs were broadly adopted by the industry and have fueled the phenomenal growth of Internet video. Xu's education background includes a B.S. degree in physics, an M.S. and Ph.D. degree in nuclear engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He also holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Rochester in NY. Xu has published many technical papers on image processing and holds many patents in the area of digital video compression.
Copyright: © 2015 Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Inc.

Bibliographic Reference(s)

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Debargha Mukherjee, Jingning Han, Jim Bankoski, Ronald Bultje, Adrian Grange, John Koleszar, Paul Wilkins, and Yaowu Xu; A Technical Overview of VP9—The Latest Open-Source Video Codec, SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal ( Volume: 124, Issue: 1, January 2015); SMPTE, 2015. Available at https://doi.org/10.5594/j18499

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Debargha Mukherjee, Jingning Han, Jim Bankoski, Ronald Bultje, Adrian Grange, John Koleszar, Paul Wilkins, and Yaowu Xu; A Technical Overview of VP9—The Latest Open-Source Video Codec, SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal ( Volume: 124, Issue: 1, January 2015); SMPTE, 2015. Available at https://doi.org/10.5594/j18499

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<span class="citation">Debargha Mukherjee, Jingning Han, Jim Bankoski, Ronald Bultje, Adrian Grange, John Koleszar, Paul Wilkins, and Yaowu Xu; <cite>A Technical Overview of VP9—The Latest Open-Source Video Codec</cite>, SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal ( Volume: 124, Issue: 1, January 2015); SMPTE, 2015. Available at <a href="https://doi.org/10.5594/j18499" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://doi.org/10.5594/j18499</a></span>

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Debargha Mukherjee, Jingning Han, Jim Bankoski, Ronald Bultje, Adrian Grange, John Koleszar, Paul Wilkins, and Yaowu Xu; <cite id="bib-10-5594-j18499">A Technical Overview of VP9—The Latest Open-Source Video Codec</cite>, SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal ( Volume: 124, Issue: 1, January 2015); SMPTE, 2015
<span class="doi">10.5594/j18499</span>
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