Polish inventor Dr Marta Karczewicz is a pioneer of video and audio streaming compression technology. She is the author of more than 700 patents relating to video compression technology, valued at more than USD 1 billion. Dr Karczewicz ranks first among female patent inventors, reports PatentVector, a patent data analysis company.

Thanks to her passion for mathematics and science, the inventor was one of the winners of the Polish Mathematics Olympiad as a child. She then received a grant from the Finnish manufacturer Nokia to conduct research in signal and image processing at the University of Tampere in Finland. There, she became interested in data compression and contributed to the development of the AVC (Advanced Video Coding) standard – a compression technology that involves removing repetitive information.

Her persistence of purpose, ambition and desire to solve problems led her to become Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm in the US, where she continued to work on the latest video coding standards. Examples of the presence of her technology in everyday life abound. One of them is the current transformation of digital terrestrial television DVB-T, replacing the AVC video coding standard with the newer and more efficient HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) standard.3 Both were just developed by Dr Karczewicz.

The Polish innovator, together with her team at Qualcomm, recently announced the development of an even newer VVC (Versatile Video Coding) standard supporting video at resolutions of up to 8K4. However, for the time being, today’s devices are not adapted to process such a compressed signal, so it will be a long time before this technology appears in our homes.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński