USPTO invited talk, "structures in video coding"

This week I had the honour of presenting an invited talk to examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office in Washington DC:

The topic of my talk was "structures in video coding". I explained how video codec structures have evolved from simple, repetitive 16x16 macroblocks in early standards such as MPEG-1....

..... to complex hierarchies of blocks in recent standards such as HEVC:

I examined the effects of increasingly complex block structures. These changes have led to dramatic improvements in compression performance but also increasing computational demands. I left the audience with a question: after 25+ years of intensive research and development, why do mainstream video codecs still rely on rectangular block structures?

- Iain Richardson