Google-Tencent Industry Workshop: Advances in Open Visual Coding and AI

Time: Monday, 14 September 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Moderator:
– Debargha Mukherjee, Google

Talks

AV2 standardization, applications and practical encoder progress, Jianle Chen, Urvang Joshi, Google
This talk presents a brief overview of AV2, the latest AOMeida video coding standard. It will cover its goals, key technical features to achieve coding gain, and its new high level functionalities which will enable diverse use cases. The talk will also present the ongoing AOM work for the practical AV2 encoder development, including the goals, milestones and the current progress.

Video Coding in the Era of AI, Leo Zhao, Tencent
Neural networks are reshaping image and video compression, from enhancing individual coding tools to enabling fully learned compression frameworks. This tutorial provides an overview of three major paradigms: neural-network-enhanced conventional codecs, autoencoder-based compression, and implicit neural representations (INR), highlighting representative techniques and recent advances in each category. We also discuss their key trade-offs in coding efficiency, computational complexity, and practical deployment, and provide perspectives on the future evolution of neural image and video coding.

Beyond Conventional Video Coding: Coding for Machines and Volumetric Visual Media, Shan Liu, Tencent
Conventional video coding has primarily focused on efficiently representing visual content for human consumption. With the rapid development of AI and emerging immersive applications, new coding paradigms are needed to support machine intelligence and volumetric visual media. This presentation provides an overview of recent advances in Video Coding for Machines (VCM) and Volumetric Visual Media (VVM), highlighting their key concepts, technical challenges, and ongoing standardization activities. We will also discuss how these emerging technologies may extend video coding beyond traditional 2D human-oriented applications.

Speakers

Dr. Jianle Chen received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in EE from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2001 and 2006, respectively. He is a software engineer in the Open Video team at Google since 2021, working on AOMedia’s next generation video codec research and development efforts. He was formerly with Samsung Electronics Company Ltd., Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA, focusing on the research of video technologies. Since 2006, he has been actively involved in the development of various video coding standards, including the VVC and HEVC standards, and their extensions in the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET).

Urvang Joshi is a Staff Software Engineer at Google and has developed new compression techniques for open-source video codecs AV1 and AV2. He serves as a Software Co-ordinator for AVM and also chairs the Machine Learning focus group at Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). His prior experience includes work on the open-source image format WebP, the Bing search engine, and research in image classification and object detection at Yahoo Labs. Urvang holds an ME degree in Computer Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His research interests encompass video compression and machine learning.

Dr. Liang (Leo) Zhao is a principal researcher and Tech Lead at Tencent Media Lab. He serves as Software Coordinator for AOMedia’s Codec Working Group. He is the lead developer for AV2’s block partition and intra prediction framework.

Dr. Shan Liu is a Distinguished Scientist and General Manager at Tencent, where she leads global R&D teams to develop technologies and products serving billion users worldwide. She is currently a WG Chair of AOMedia VVM, Vice Chair of IEEE DCSC and Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TCSVT. Dr. Liu is a Fellow of IEEE and IET.