Michael J. Horowitz (born January 2, 1964, in Ames, Iowa) is an American electrical engineer whose contributions to video coding standardization and early integration of newly minted standards into video products have facilitated the widespread commercial adoption of the H.264 AVC, H.264 SVC, H.265 HEVC, and AV1 video coding standards. He is co-inventor of flexible macroblock ordering (FMO)United States Patent 7,239,662 and tiles,United States Patent 9,060,174 essential features in H.264|AVC and H.265|HEVC, respectively.
Early Background Horowitz was born and raised in Ames, Iowa. He received an A.B. degree from Cornell University. In 1998, under the supervision of Professor David Neuhoff, he received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from The University of Michigan.
Standardization Several video coding standards have been published over the past forty years. Not all have been widely adopted. Excellent compression performance does not guarantee commercial viability. Other factors such as computational complexity play important roles. Horowitz led efforts to reduce computational complexity during the development of the H.264|AVCHorowitz, Michael, Johansen, Tom-Ivar, "H.26L Complexity Revisited," Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) 14th Meeting: Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 24-27 Sep., 2001.Horowitz, Michael, "H.26L Complexity Ad-Hoc Group Report," Joint Video Team (JVT) 2nd Meeting: Geneva, CH, Jan. 29 - Feb. 1, 2002. and H.265|HEVC standards.Horowitz, Michael, "Ad hoc Group Report – Computational Efficiency," Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) 39th Meeting: Kyoto, Japan, January 17-22, 2010. In a related effort, to leverage the full computational power of multi-core CPUs, he led the effort to develop H.265|HEVC coding tools for high-level parallelismSullivan, Gary, Ohm, Jens-Rainer, "Meeting report of the eighth meeting of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), San Jose, US, 1–10 Feb. 2012," p. 124. (e.g., tiles).
In addition to computational complexity reduction work, Horowitz has led standardization development efforts for error resilience toolsWenger, Stephan, Horowitz, Michael, "Scattered Slices: A New Error Resilience Tool for H.26L," Joint Video Team (JVT) 2nd Meeting: Geneva, CH, Jan. 29 - Feb. 1, 2002. (e.g., FMO in H.264|AVC) and the real-time bitstream transport protocol (RTP) for AV1.
Early Commercialization The complexity of modern video coding standards demands a great deal of engineering effort and skill to develop product-ready implementations of the standard. For example, to become production-ready a software codec implementation may need to be optimized to run thousands of times faster than the standard's reference software. Products released shortly after the publication of a standard demonstrate commercial viability thereby facilitating adoption by other manufacturers who might otherwise opt not to risk using the standard.
In May 2000 while at Polycom, Horowitz developed and demonstrated the first product-ready implementation of macroblock-adaptive multiple reference framesWiegand, T., Girod, B. “Multi-frame motion-compensated prediction for video transmission”, page xi, Springer, 2001. overcoming concerns that its high computational complexity would prevent commercial adoption. The tool was published as Annex U of H.263. Macroblock-adaptive multiple reference frames is a mainstay of every subsequent video coding standard.
In 2003, while still at Polycom, he led the team that produced the first commercially available in-product implementation of H.264|AVCAndrew W. Davis, "The Wainhouse Bulletin," Volume 4 Issue #8, February 2003. demonstrating that the new H.264|AVC standard could be used successfully in real-time low-delay commercial products.
In 2008, at Vidyo, Horowitz architected and led the team that developed the first commercially available in-product implementation of H.264 SVC
In 2012, at eBrisk Video, Horowitz served as lead engineer of the team that developed one of the first commercially available implementations of H.265|HEVC demonstrating that a real-time software implementation of the standard could yield high coding efficiency.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.
In 2020, at Google, Horowitz served as technical lead of the AV1 for Google Duo project that became the first commercially available real-time interactive video implementation of AV1, dispelling the myth that older entry-level mobile devices did not have sufficient computational resources to support a real-time software implementation of AV1.Nick Statt, "Google Duo video calls are about to look a whole lot better," The Verge, April 22, 2020. The AV1 implementation in Duo and subsequently Google Meet supports video calling at bit rates as low as 40 kilobits per second on modest entry-level mobile devices thereby enabling people to connect in regions of the world where video calls would not otherwise be possible.
References