The Image & Video Group (originated from the Image Communcation Group) at the Image Processing department (IP) of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute is an active contributor to the ITU-T | ISO/IEC Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization.
The JVT has been created to jointly work on the H.264/AVC Video Coding standard (officially chartered as ITU-T Recommendation H.264 & ISO/IEC 14496-10 AVC).

The work on H.264/AVC was split into various phases:

• Phase 0: Specification of H.264/AVC Baseline, Main, and Extended Profiles, December 2001 - May 2003
• Phase 1: Fidelity Range extension (FRExt): Specification of H.264/AVC High Profile and professional profiles, June 2003 - October 2004
• Phase 2: Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension: Specification of H.264/AVC Scalable Baseline and Scalable High profiles, November 2005 - July 2007
• Phase 3: Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) extension: in progress since July 2006

• Context-Based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC)
• Multi-Frame Motion-Compensated Prediction
• Tree-Structured Macro Block Partition
• Rate-Distortion Optimization of the Encoder in Error-Free Environments (non-normative)
• Rate-Distortion Optimization of the Encoder in Error-Prone Environments (non-normative)
• See overview paper on H.264/AVC: Thomas Wiegand, Gary J. Sullivan, Gisle Bjøntegaard, and Ajay Luthra: Overview of the H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard , IEEE Transactions on Circuits and systems for Video Technology, vol. 13, no. 7, pp 560-576, July 2003.

• 8x8 transform design
• 8x8 intra prediction design
• See overview paper on FRExt: Detlev Marpe, Stephen Gordon, and Thomas Wiegand: H.264/MPEG4-AVC Fidelity Range Extensions: Tools, Profiles, Performance, and Application Areas, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP'05), Genova, Italy, September 2005.

• The first model for SVC that became the first working draft and has remained almost unchanged (plus interlaced and arbitrary spatial ratios)
• Hierarchical B pictures
• Medium grain scalability
• See overview paper on SVC: Thomas Wiegand, Gary J. Sullivan, Jens-Rainer Ohm, and Ajay K. Luthra: Introduction to the Special Issue on Scalable Video Coding—Standardization and Beyond, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 17, no. 9, pp. 1099-1102, September 2007.

• The first model for MVC that became the first working draft
• See overview paper on MVC: Philipp Merkle, Aljoscha Smolic, Karsten Müller, and Thomas Wiegand: Efficient Prediction Structures for Multiview Video Coding, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Special Issue on Multi-view Video Coding and 3DTV, Vol. 17, No. 11, pp. 1461-1473, November 2007.