School of Engineering

William A. Pearlman
Research Professor
Director, CIPR http://www.cipr.rpi.edu/~pearlman/

Department Affiliation:

Department of Electrical, Computer, & Systems Engineering

Education:

Ph.D., Stanford University
Electrical Engineering

M.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Electrical Engineering

B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Electrical Engineering

Background:

Since 1979 Dr. Pearlman has been with the ECSE Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he is currently Professor. He had been Director of the Center for Next Generation Video Research, but has relinquished that post to serve as Director of the Center for Image Processing Research (CIPR). 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. During the Summer of 2001, he was in residence as Visiting Professor at the University of Hannover in Hannover, Germany. His research interests are in information theory, source coding theory, image, video and audio coding, and image processing. He has authored or co-authored more than 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.

Research Interests:

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.