A Technical Overview of AV1 Video Codec from Open Media Alliance

Google embarked on the WebM Project in 2010 to develop open source, royalty-­free video codecs designed specifically for media on the Web. The second generation codec released by the WebM project, VP9, ­is currently served by YouTube, and enjoys billions of views per day. Realizing the need for even greater compression efficiency and to cope with the ever-increasing demand for video on the web, the WebM team started an ambitious project to develop a next edition royalty-free codec AV1, in a consortium of major tech companies called the Alliance for Open Media. The goal of AV1 is to achieve a generational improvement in coding efficiency over VP9 at a practical hardware and software complexity, and is scheduled to be finalized by the end of 2017. In this talk, we will provide a technical overview of the major prediction, transform and in-loop filtering tools under consideration in AV1. Preliminary results will be presented on standard test sets.

Speakers: Debargha Mukherjee, Ph.D and Jingning Han, Ph.D