Gary J. Sullivan

Biography

Together with colleagues Gisle Bjøntegaard and Thomas Wiegand, Gary J. Sullivan was a leading figure in the creation of the ground-breaking H.264/MPEG4-AVC coding standard for the compression, transmission, recording, and storage of digital video. H.264/MPEG4-AVC has impacted technology ranging from smart phones to Blu-Ray disc players and broadcast television. Released in May 2003, the new standard was a major improvement over the previous H.262/MPEG-2 video coding standard, with not only better compression capability but also the flexibility to support a wide range of platforms and applications, including handheld mobile devices, Blu-Ray players, Internet video streaming, and HDTV. As chair of the Joint Video Team, Dr. Sullivan wrote a significant portion of the standard and managed the process from Dr. Bjøntegaard’s first proposal to the final version. He led the team through enhancements addressing additional uses for professional applications and scalable and three-dimensional video coding and also made numerous technical contributions including high-level syntax, network abstraction, timing indications, and hypothetical reference decoding.

An IEEE and SPIE Fellow, Dr. Sullivan is currently a video and image technology architect with Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington.