Digital Signal Compression

William A. Pearlman is a Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Department at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he has been a faculty member since 1979. He has more than 35 years of experience in teaching and researching in the fields of information theory, data compression, digital signal processing and digital communications theory. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the SPIE, and is the co-inventor of two celebrated image compression algorithms: SPIHT and SPECK. Amir Said is currently a Master Researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, where he has worked since 1998. His research interests include multimedia communications, coding and information theory, image and video compression, signal processing and optimization, and he has more than 50 publications in these fields. He is co-inventor with Dr Pearlman of the SPIHT image compression algorithm and co-recipient, also with Dr Pearlman, of two Best Paper Awards, one from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and the other from the IEEE Signal Processing Society.