Fumitada Itakura

is a Japanese scientist. He did pioneering work in statistical signal processing, and its application to speech analysis, synthesis and coding, including the development of the linear predictive coding (LPC) and line spectral pairs (LSP) methods.

Biography Itakura was born in Toyokawa, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Nagoya University in 1963 and 1965, respectively. In 1968, he joined the NTT Musashino Electrical Communication Laboratory in Tokyo. The following year, Itakura and Saito introduced partial correlation (PARCOR) to LPC. From 1973 to 1975, he worked at the Acoustics Research Department of Bell Labs, having been invited to work there on fundamental problems by James Flanagan, who had been impressed by one of Itakura's papers on low bit-rate encoding.

In 1975, Itakura developed the line spectral pairs (LSP) method for high-compression speech coding, while at NTT.

Itakura's work on spectral and formant estimation laid the foundation for much of the early progress in speech signal processing. His work on autoregressive modeling of speech is used in nearly every modern low-to-medium, bit-rate speech transmission system, and the line spectral pair representation he developed is now found in nearly all cellular telephone systems. (with B. S. Atal), the IEEE Signal Processing 1996 Society Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the IEICE 2002 Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award, and the 2003 Purple Ribbon Medal from Japanese Government. In 2005, he received the Asahi Prize and the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal. In 2009, he received the NEC C&C Prize for his pioneering research and the development of highly efficient voice-coding technology with analysis-synthesis methods for speech. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for pioneering contributions to speech processing, and an honorary member the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan.