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Ingrid Daubechies, Pioneer of Wavelet Transforms, to Receive 2011 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal

Contributions Have Provided an Indispensable Signal Processing Tool that Has Impacted Many Consumer Applications

10 August 2011 – Ingrid Daubechies, a mathematician whose development of practical wavelet transforms revolutionized signal processing and has impacted audio, image and video devices and communications systems used every day by consumers, is being honored by IEEE with the 2011 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional association.

The medal, sponsored by Texas Instruments, Inc., recognizes Daubechies for pioneering contributions to the theory and applications of wavelets and filter banks. The medal will be presented on 20 August 2011 at the IEEE Honors Ceremony in San Francisco, Calif.

Considered one of the best known female mathematicians, Daubechies’ development of orthogonal bases of compact support in 1998 was a watershed moment for the field of signal processing. Her work opened up new pathways of theory and applications for wavelets and filter banks and showed that their practical use in applications was indeed possible. The “Daubechies Wavelets” are now a key tool for signal processors, and wavelet transforms have found many applications in science, engineering and computer science. Used for signal coding and data compression, wavelet transforms have impacted today’s handheld digital devices, medical imaging systems and even seismic exploration systems.

In her groundbreaking work, Daubechies demonstrated how to design well-behaved orthogonal wavelets of compact support using well-known filter banks and was able to provide a complete analysis. She then extended her wavelet techniques to expand their range of applications. In 1992, with colleagues she developed a family of symmetrical biorthogonal wavelet bases to better handle image and video encoding problems. The eventual JPEG 2000 image coding standard, which enables applications such as next-generation entertainment systems and medical systems for telediagnosis, would be based on these wavelets and filter banks. Daubechies also worked with Wim Sweldens to apply Sweldens’ lifting algorithm to general wavelet transforms. The resulting algorithms offered state-of-art performance in speed and memory. She also applied lifting to a integer-to-integer wavelet transform that eliminated the noise present in standard transform coding algorithms. The lifted and integer-to-integer wavelets are key components of the JPEG 2000 standard.

An IEEE Fellow, Daubechies is also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and president of the International Mathematical Union. Her honors include the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics, the American Mathematical Society’s Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize and two Steele Prizes, the IEEE Information Technology Society’s Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation, the Eduard Rhein Foundation Basic Research Award and the Gold Medal from the Flemish Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her bachelor’s and doctorate degrees, both in physics, from Vrije Universiteit, Belgium, Brussels. From 1994 to 2010 Daubechies was a professor in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University, N.J., which she directed from 1997 to 2011. She joined Duke University, Durham, N.C., in January 2011 where she is currently the James B. Duke professor in the mathematics department.