[video-codec] VP9 and HEVC compression challenges @ PCS 2013

[Axel Becker <[e-mail]>]

g'day everybody, how are you today? 

we are writing you on behalf of the Picture Coding Symposium organizing committee as we believe that this group has a lot to offer to the video coding community. 

the Picture Coding Symposium has been a very successful platform for compression researchers from academia and industry for many years. facilitating and enabling 
technical dialogs and discussions and information exchange is very important to us. 

for this year, with sponsorships from google and microsoft, we have put together two compression challenges: one compression challenge will be based 
on the VP9 codec (we already have a special branch called pcs-2013) and one compression challenge will be HEVC based. in each competition we will 
award a total of U$10000. 

in each competition we have two subcategories: optimizations (encoder modifications only) and new tools (both encoder and decoder modifications). participants 
can of course decide where they want to participate - or submit a technology to both codec frameworks - if it works in both. 

if you are interested, please, have a look at http://pcs2013.org where you can find much more information. also note, that the Picture Coding Symposium 2013 has a 
linkedin group http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Picture-Coding-Symposium-2013-4838120?gid=4838120&mostPopular=&trk=tyah
and we will of course provide updates in the months to come. 

only so much for today, we hope you are interested and that we get to meet many of you in person at the conference! 

nice rgds, axel becker-lakus and antonio ortega