DSP FOR IN VEHICLE AND MOBILE SYSTEMS

Edited by Hüseyin Abut
                  John H.L. Hansen
                  Kazuya Takeda

published by
Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.

pages 330







This book, “DSP for In-Vehicle and Mobile Systems”, contains a collection
of research papers authored by prominent specialists in the field. It is
dedicated to Professor Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University. It is offered
as a tribute to his sustained leadership in Digital Signal Processing during a
professional career that spans both industry and academe. In many cases, the
work reported in this volume has directly built upon or been influenced by the
innovative genius of Professor Itakura.
While this outstanding book is a major contribution to our scientific literature,
it represents but a small chapter in the anthology of technical contributions
made by Professor Itakura. His purview has been broad. But always at the
center has been digital signal theory, computational techniques, and human
communication. In his early work, as a research scientist at the NTT
Corporation, Itakura brought new thinking to bit-rate compression of speech
signals. In partnership with Dr. S. Saito, he galvanized the attendees of the
1968 International Congress on Acoustics in Tokyo with his presentation of
the Maximum Likelihood Method applied to analysis-synthesis telephony.
The presentation included demonstration of speech transmission at 5400
bits/sec with quality higher than heretofore achieved. His concept of an allpole
recursive digital filter whose coefficients are constantly adapted to
predict and match the short-time power spectrum of the speech signal caused
many colleagues to hurry back to their labs and explore this new direction.
From Itakura’s stimulation flowed much new research that led to significant
advances in linear prediction, the application of autocorrelation, and
eventually useful links between cepstral coefficients and linear prediction.
Itakura was active all along this route, contributing among other ideas, new
knowledge about the Line Spectral Pair (LSP) as a robust means for encoding
predictor coefficients. A valuable by-product of his notion of adaptively
matching the power spectrum with an all-pole digital filter gave rise to the
Itakura-Saito distance measure, later employed in speech recognition as well
as a criterion for low-bit-rate coding, and also used extensively in evaluating
speech enhancement algorithms.
Itakura’s originality did not escape notice at Bell labs. After protracted
legalities, a corporate arrangement was made for sustained exchange of
research scientists between ATT and NTT. Fumitada Itakura was the first to
initiate the program, which later encompassed such notables as Sadaoki Furui,
Yoh`ichi Tohkura, Steve Levenson, David Roe, and subsequent others from
DSP for In-Vehicle and Mobile Systems vi
both organizations. At Bell Labs during 1974 and -75, Fumitada ventured
into automatic speech recognition, implementing an airline reservation system
on an early laboratory computer. Upon his return to his home company Dr.
Itakura was given new responsibilities in research management, and his
personal reputation attracted exceptional engineering talent to his vibrant
organization.
Following fifteen years of service with NTT, the challenges of academe
beckoned, and Dr. Itakura was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering
in Nagoya University – the university which originally awarded his PhD
degree. Since this time he has led research and education in Electrical
Engineering, and Acoustic Signal Processing, all the while building upon his
expertise in communications and computing. Sophisticated microphone
systems to combat noise and reverberation were logical research targets, as
exemplified by his paper with colleagues presented in this volume. And, he
has continued management responsibilities in contributing to the leadership of
the Nagoya University Center for Integrated Acoustic Information Research
(CIAIR).
Throughout his professional career Professor Itakura has steadily garnered
major recognition and technical awards, both national and international. But
perhaps none rivals the gratification brought by the recognition bestowed by
his own country in 2003 -- when in formal ceremony at the Imperial Palace,
with his wife Nobuko in attendance, Professor Itakura was awarded the
coveted Shiju-hosko Prize, also known as the Purple Ribbon Medal.
To his stellar record of career-long achievement we now add the dedication of
this modest technical volume. Its pages are few by comparison to his
accomplishments, but the book amply reflects the enormous regard in which
Professor Fumitada Itakura is held by his colleagues around the world.
                                                                                                   Jim Flanagan
                                                                                                   Rutgers University

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