Edward J. Delp

Edward John Delp III is an American electrical engineer and academic who is the Charles William Harrison Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University. Delp's research has focused on image processing, video compression, medical imaging, digital watermarking, and multimedia security and forensics.

Delp is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T), SPIE, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Early life and education Delp was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 1973 and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the same university in 1975. He later pursued doctoral studies at Purdue University, earning a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1979. His dissertation, Moment Preserving Quantization and Its Application in Block Truncation Coding, was supervised by Owen Robert Mitchell Jr.

In 2002, Tampere University of Technology in Finland awarded Delp an honorary Doctor of Technology degree.

Academic career

From 1980 to 1984, Delp was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan. In 1984, he joined Purdue University as a faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue. In 2008, he was appointed the Charles William Harrison Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, while continuing his appointment as professor of biomedical engineering.

Research

Delp's research has focused on image processing, video processing, computer vision, signal processing, and multimedia security. His early work examined image-compression methods, including block truncation coding and autoregressive models for digital-image representation. He has also worked on computer-assisted medical-image analysis, including applications in echocardiography and mammography.

His research on image and video compression has addressed rate-scalable coding, low-complexity coding, error-resilient video transmission, and motion estimation. He has also investigated the use of networked and mobile systems for image-based applications, as well as content-based video analysis, video indexing, and image retrieval.

Another area of Delp's research is multimedia security and digital forensics. His work in this field has included digital watermarking, image authentication, and the forensic identification of printers, scanners, and imaging sensors. Related studies have addressed document security and methods for detecting manipulated digital media.

His subsequent research in media forensics has examined the integrity of scientific images, the detection of manipulated satellite imagery, and the identification of deepfake and other generated media.

Delp has also applied computer-vision and machine learning methods to interdisciplinary research. These applications have included mobile dietary assessment, fluorescence-microscopy image analysis, public-safety video analysis, and person re-identification. His agricultural applications have included image-based plant phenotyping and precision agriculture, while his later work has also considered speech forensics.

Honors and awards 1997 – Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1998 – Fellow of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) 1998 – Elected Fellow of SPIE 2001 – Raymond C. Bowman Award, Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2003 – Elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering 2004 – Wilfred Hesselberth Award for Teaching Excellence, Purdue University 2004 – Claude Shannon–Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society 2008 – Norbert Wiener Society Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society 2011 – U.S. Army Research Laboratory Director's Coin 2014 – Morrill Award, Purdue University 2015 – Named Scientist of the Year by IS&T and SPIE 2017 – Aden and Marjorie Meinel Technology Achievement Award, SPIE 2017 – Honorary Membership, Society for Imaging Science and Technology 2019 – Inducted into the Purdue Book of Great Teachers 2024 – Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors 2024 – Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2025 – Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS)

Books

Buda, A. J., and Delp, E. J. (eds.). Digital Cardiac Imaging. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1985. Delp, E. J. (ed.). Nonlinear Image Processing, Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Nonlinear Image Processing, Vol. 1247, Santa Clara, California, 1990.