Summer School on Video Compression and Processing: Scientific exchange and networking in a relaxed atmosphere in Ilmenau

It was neither a typical workshop nor a classical conference, and the setting was also deliberately informal: 50 PhD students, post-docs and professors from universities all over Germany and other parts of Europe met at the invitation of the VDE ITG Expert Committee MT 2 "Image Communication and Processing" in the premises of the Institute of Media Technology (IMT) at the TU Ilmenau to intensively exchange ideas on current topics in signal processing, compression and perception of images and video, which are also covered in the Media Technology degree program at the TU Ilmenau.

Our main goal was to stimulate discussions and to promote joint research among the participating young researchers

explains Professor Alexander Raake, Head of the Audiovisual Technology Group, who opened the Summer School in Ilmenau - where the famous German poet Goethe stayed a total of 28 times, as he mentioned right at the beginning. In his talk, he introduced the participants to the state-of-the-art laboratories in the new Ilmenau Interactive Immersive Technologies Center (I3TC), where innovative virtual and augmented reality technologies and their application are being researched, especially those approaches and systems that are oriented as closely as possible to reality. In the subsequent keynote, Christian Feldmann, Team Lead Encoding at Bitmovin, presented challenges and solutions for video encoding in the cloud.

From energy-efficient video streaming to machine learning

The topics that the participants dealt with in the further course of the event ranged from energy-efficient video streaming, techniques for next-generation image and video coding, film look, machine learning, processing of high-resolution images and videos and compression methods to image and video signal analysis and quality assessment/quality of experience (QoE) in virtual, mixed and augmented reality. In addition, in several demo sessions, IMT staff demonstrated, among other things, their research on technology-enhanced social co-presence as part of the CO-HUMANICS project or on spatial audio recording and audio playback for use in Augmented Reality as part of the DFG priority program Auditory Cognition in Interactive Virtual Environments (AUDICTIVE).

The Summer School also discussed in particular the challenges, open topics and problems in the current research of young scientists. Prof. Raake:

Our main aim was to bring together young researchers with similar topics and to create a basis for fruitful scientific discussions that would motivate future collaboration.

This succeeded particularly well at the joint barbecue during the pre-school event at the BC Club and the networking hike to the Hotel Gabelbach followed by dinner. As one of the highlights of the event, Andy Regensky and Goluck Konuko were awarded the Best Presentation Awards.

Impressions of the 7th ITG/VDE Summer School on Video Compression and Processing (SVCP2022)