Gary Sullivan (engineer)

Gary J. Sullivan is an American electrical engineer who led the development of the H.264/AVC video coding standard and created the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API/DDI video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system platform. He was the chairman of the Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization committee that developed the H.264/AVC standard, and he edited large portions of it. He has also led and contributed to a number of other video and image related standardization projects such as extensions of ITU-T H.263 video coding and the standardization of JPEG XR image coding.

Dr. Sullivan is the rapporteur/chairman of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG), a co-chairman of the video part of the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), and a co-chairman of the Joint Video Team (JVT), which is a joint project between the VCEG and MPEG organizations. He has led ITU-T VCEG (ITU-T Q.6/SG16) since 1996 and is also the ITU-T video liaison representative to MPEG and JPEG. In MPEG (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11), in addition to his current service as a co-chair of its video work, he also served as the chairman of MPEG video from March 2001 to May 2002. In the Joint Video Team he was the chairman for the development of the next generation H.264/AVC video coding standard and its fidelity-range extensions (FRExt), and was a co-chairman for the development of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extensions. He is currently a co-chair of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding which is developing the High Efficiency Video Coding standard.

Recognitions and awards for Dr. Sullivan (and the projects he has led in the standardization community) have included the following:
 * Fellow of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) for achievements in video and image compression technologies, 2009.
 * Paired Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards – one awarded to VCEG and one to MPEG by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for development of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard, 2009.
 * Primetime Emmy Engineering Award – awarded to the JVT standards committee by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for development of the High Profile of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, 2008.
 * International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) Leadership award, 2008.
 * Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Consumer Electronics Engineering Excellence Award, 2008.
 * Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to video coding and its standardization, 2006.
 * The video coding work of the ITU-T led by Sullivan for the preceding ten years was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history, 2006.
 * Technical Achievement award of the International Committee on Technology Standards (INCITS) for his work on H.264/AVC and other video standardization topics, 2005.

Sullivan received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Louisville J. B. Speed School of Engineering, Kentucky, in 1982 and 1983, respectively. He received Ph.D. and Engineer degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1991.

Sullivan holds the position of Video Architect in the Core Media Processing Team of the Windows Division of Microsoft Corporation. At Microsoft he also designed and remains lead engineer for the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API/DDI video decoding feature of the Microsoft Windows operating system platform. His DXVA designs include decoding acceleration schemes for H.261, MPEG-1, H.262/MPEG-2, H.263, MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264/AVC, Windows Media Video versions 8 and 9, and VC-1.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 1999, he was the manager of communications core research at PictureTel Corporation, the former world leader in videoconferencing communication. He was previously a Howard Hughes Fellow and member of technical staff in the Advanced Systems Division of Hughes Aircraft Corporation, and a terrain-following radar system software engineer for Texas Instruments.

Video Coding Standardization Organizations

 * Joint Video Team (JVT)
 * ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)
 * ITU-T Study Group 16

Video Coding Standards

 * ITU-T Recommendation H.264, also standardized as ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 10
 * ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 2
 * ITU-T Recommendation H.263
 * ITU-T Recommendation H.262, also standardized as ISO/IEC MPEG-2 Video
 * ISO/IEC MPEG-1 Video
 * ITU-T Recommendation H.261

DirectX Video Acceleration

 * DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA)
 * DXVA for Video Decoding
 * DXVA for H.264/AVC Decoding
 * DXVA for Windows Media Video v8, v9 and vA Decoding (Including SMPTE 421M "VC-1")
 * DXVA for H.261, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (H.262), H.263, and MPEG-4 Part 2