During the 1985-1986 academic year, and again for the spring semester in 1993, he was on sabbatical leave as Visiting Professor and Lady Davis Scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He also held a Visiting Professor Chair at Delft University of Technology in Delft, the Netherlands in 1993, and has been an IBM Visiting Scientist in the IBM-Rio Scientific Center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1988.
His research interests are in information theory, source coding theory, image, video and audio coding, and image processing. He has authored or co-authored over 200 publications in these fields.
He has taught courses in probability and random processes, digital signal processing, communication systems, digital communications, information theory, image coding, data compression, and
detection and estimation theory.
Dr. Pearlman is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of SPIE.
He has served on the steering committee of SPIE's Visual
Communications and Image Processing (VCIP) Conference since its inception in 1986,
and in 1989 and 2008 served as the conference chair. At VCIP 2010 in Huangshan, China, where he was keynote speaker, he was presented a Certificate of Appreciation in recognition of his leadership and contributions to this conference since its inception. He has also served on technical
program committees of several IEEE conferences and several proposal review panels for the National Science Foundation.
He was a past Associate
Editor of Coding for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.
He has been an active delegate to the ISO/JPEG2000 Working Group charged to
set a new international standard for still image compression.
He received the
IEEE Circuits and Systems Society 1998 Video Transactions Best Paper
Award and the IEEE Signal Processing Society 1998 Best Paper Award in the
Area of Multidimensional Signal and Image Processing. On 27 June, 2001,
he was awarded a prize from
the Robert Bosch Foundation for distinguished contributions
to the field of picture coding.
Also in 2001, he was awarded an NRC Associateship from the National Academy of Science, and in 2009, the Rensselaer School of Engineering presented him its Research Excellence Award.
Dr. Pearlman is also engaged as President and Chief Scientific Officer of PrimaComp, Inc.,
a small company that markets and licenses software for image and video compression.
Dr. Pearlman is perhaps best known as co-inventor of two celebrated image compression algorithms: Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) with Amir Said
; and Set Partitioning Embeddeded bloCK (SPECK) Coder with Asad Islam (Conference Paper)
(Journal Article).
For coding examples using these algorithms, the following links are provided:
A printed and bound version of this article is available at a 50% discount from Now Publishers.
A printed and bound version of this article is available at a 50% discount from Now Publishers.
Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Department
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180-3590
E-mail: pearlw@ecse.rpi.edu
Homepage: http://ecse.rpi.edu/~pearlman
Contents
Biography
William Pearlman received the S.B. and S.M. degrees in electrical engineering from M.I.T. in 1963 and the Ph.D degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1974.
Between 1963 and 1974 he was employed as an engineer and consultant by Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, CA, and as an engineer by GTE-Sylvania in Mountain View, CA. He left industry in 1974 to become Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Since 1979 Dr. Pearlman has been with the ECSE Department at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He entered RPI as an Associate Professor and held the title of Professor from 1988 to 2006, when he changed his status to Research Professor. He had held the position of
Director of the Center for Image Processing Research (CIPR) for a number of years until October 2009. He retired on October 1, 2010 as Professor Emeritus.
Books
This book is a textbook on signal compression suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students and for practioners in the field. It contains many figures, examples, and practice problems that are often computer projects.
The 156-page problem solutions manual is available to instructors.
Tutorials on Set Partition Coding and Image Wavelet Coding Systems are contained in the following two-part monograph:
It can be obtained by entering the promotional code SIG00203 on the order form .
It can be obtained by entering the promotional code SIG00203 on the order form .
Lecture Notes on Selected Topics in Digital Communications and Information Theory
for Source Coding and Signal Processing Systems
Patents
Presentations
Selected Technical Articles
Lossless and Lossy Image Compression
Video Compression and Transmission
Higher-Dimensional Compression of Images and Image Sequences
Audio and Biological Signal Compression
Information Theory, Quantization and Rate-Distortion Theory
Filter and Filter Bank Design, Image Processing
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