Ronald W. Schafer
Mobile and Media Systems Lab
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Palo Alto, CA

The Cepstrum, Polynomials, and Sid Burrus

The concept of the "cepstrum" of a signal has a rich history dating back to the early days of DSP research. The original development of this concept owed much to the FFT and a frequency-domain framework. The difficult problem of "phase unwrapping" is a central issue in the frequency-domain approach. However, the cepstrum can also be computed from the zeros and poles of the z-transform of the signal. Recently, this approach has gained new energy from work by Sid Burrus and collaborators on the rooting of high-degree polynomials. I will describe some fun I have been having with this approach.

Monday, February 14, 2005
9:00 a.m. - McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall
Rice University

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* Biography:

Ronald W. Schafer has BSEE and MSEE degrees from the University of Nebraska and a Ph.D. degree from MIT. From 1968 to 1974 he was a member of the Acoustics Research Department, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, where he contributed to some of the earliest research on digital signal processing. In 1974 he joined Georgia Tech as John and Marilu McCarty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Over a thirty-year academic career, he introduced literally thousands of students to the field of digital signal processing. In 2004, he retired from Georgia Tech as Professor Emeritus, and now he is a HP Fellow in the Mobile and Media Systems Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Acoustical Society of America, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Schafer has co-authored six widely used textbooks in the DSP field, and he has received numerous awards for teaching and research including the 1985 Distinguished Professor Award at Georgia Tech and the 1980 Emanuel R Piori Award and the 1992 IEEE Education Medal from IEEE.