Dr. Kei Kawamura has promoted research, standardization and commercialization of extended technology to extend the application field of the H.265/HEVC, that is, the international video compression coding standard. The extension of video coding applications has been conducted from three aspects: 1) range extension; 2) scalable extension; and 3) Multiview extension. From these respective aspects, his achievements can be summarized as follows.For 1), range extension, in the representation of an image pixel, further increases in bit depth and the number of chroma samples were needed in order to maintain the color representation quality required for professional use in broadcasting studios. In order to avoid the significant data increase introduced by such pixel format extensions, he promoted research into inter-chroma channel prediction coding, and the bit reduction gain reached 5% while maintaining picture quality. Moreover, a new standard with regard to the H.265/HEVC range extension scheme has been specified through his successive contribution. For 2), scalable extension, since ultra-high resolution video such as 4K and 8K have been commercialized, three types of video formats including HDTV have become available in Japanese broadcasting. Under this situation, he promoted research into hybrid scalable coding where HDTV is compressed individually along with the legacy standard scheme in digital broadcasting, and 4K and 8K are coded through prediction from the decoded HDTV signals. The hybrid scalable approach can maintain both backward compatibility and high coding efficiency, and video services of various resolution grades can be provided by a single operation, independent of the difference in generation of the STB terminal. This coding framework has been adopted as the H.265/HEVC scalable extension in the international standard. Finally, for 3), multiview extension, the shooting of Multiview videos by more than 10 cameras has become more popular especially for the sport content production. He has accelerated research into video compression coding schemes that enable the simplified handling of multiview video even under narrow bandwidth. He has focused on research into application technology, and the world’s first 8K real-time codec, fully compliant with H.265/HEVC multiview extension, has been developed successfully. Referring to this development, he has initiated the standardization of conformance specification and supplemental data formats regarding the H.265/HEVC multiview extension to strongly support the development and commercialization of corresponding STB products.
