Jörn Ostermann studied Electrical Engineering and Communications Engineering at the University of Hannover and Imperial College London, respectively. He received Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. from the University of Hannover in 1988 and 1994, respectively. From 1988 till 1994, he worked as a Research Assistant at the Institut für Theoretische Nachrichtentechnik conducting research in low bit-rate and object-based analysis-synthesis video coding. In 1994 and 1995 he worked in the Visual Communications Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs on video coding. He was a member of Image Processing and Technology Research within AT&T Labs - Research from 1996 to 2003. Since 2003 he is Full Professor and Head of the Institut für Informationsverarbeitung at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. In 2007, he became head of the Laboratory for Information Technology.

From 1993 to 1994, he chaired the European COST 211 sim group coordinating research in low bitrate video coding. Within MPEG-4, he organized the evaluation of video tools to start defining the standard. He chaired the Adhoc Group on Coding of Arbitrarily-shaped Objects in MPEG-4 Video. Since 2008, he is the Chair of the Requirements Group of MPEG (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG11). Jörn was a scholar of the German National Foundation. In 1998, he received the AT&T Standards Recognition Award and the ISO award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing and past chair of the IEEE CAS Visual Signal Processing and Communications (VSPC) Technical Committee. Joern served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE CAS Society. He published more than 100 research papers and book chapters. He is coauthor of a graduate level text book on video communications. He holds more than 30 patents.

His current research interests are video coding and streaming, 3D modeling, face animation, and computer-human interfaces.