Peter Kroon, Infineon Technologies
Modern cell phones have become widely accepted across the world, and have become small wonders of media signal processing. Although voice will always remain the essential media signal for a phone, many other multimedia applications have found its way into cell phones, making it a true media signal processing device. Voice, audio, image, video and graphics are all present, and are processed using techniques based on years of media signal processing research. To make this all work in a device that is constrained by power, size and cost has turned out to be quite a challenge. This talk will review some of the relevant media standards and processing techniques that are commonly found in cell phones. We also highlight some interesting accomplishments, and describe some of the challenges that we will find ahead.
Peter Kroon (Fellow’96) received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.
The regular-pulse excitation speech coding technique described in his PhD thesis forms the basis of the GSM full rate coder. In 1986 he joined Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, where he has worked on a variety of speech coding applications, including the design and development of the 4.8 kbit/s secure voice standard FS1016 and the ITU-T 8 kbit/s speech coding standard G.729. From 1996 till 2000 he supervised a research group at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies working in the areas of speech and audio coding design and communications technology. In 2000 Dr. Kroon became director of Media Signal Processing Research at Agere Systems, a spin off from Lucent Technologies, where he was responsible for research and development of media processing for satellite radio, VoIP and cellular terminals. In 2003 he moved to the Mobility business unit of Agere, where he was chief multimedia architect and manager of the multimedia systems group responsible for algorithmic design, and software and hardware integration of multimedia components for cellular phones. In October 2007, this BU was acquired by Infineon Technologies, where Dr. Kroon continues his role as chief multimedia architect.
Dr. Kroon received the 1989 IEEE SP Award for authors less than 30 years old, for his paper on Regular Pulse Coding. He is an IEEE fellow, and served as Member of IEEE Speech Committee (1994-1996), General Chair, IEEE Speech Coding Workshop 1997, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio processing (1997-2000), Member at Large, IEEE Signal Processing Society Boards of Governors (2001-2003), and as Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing Special Issue on Objective Quality Assessment of Speech and Audio (2006). Dr. Kroon has published more than 50 papers, and holds 15 US patents.