Received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in 1964 and 1967, respectively, from the Technion -Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, and the PhD degree in 1971 from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, all in Electrical Engineering.
Following two years on the staff of the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada, he joined in 1972 the Technion, where he has been an Elron-Elbit Professor of Electrical Engineering until his retirement in October 2011, becoming a Professor Emeritus.
During the period 1979 to 2001 he spent about 6 years, cumulatively, of sabbaticals and summer leaves at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, and AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ, conducting research in the areas of Speech and Image Communication and the summer of 2004 at the Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology – GCATT, working in the area of Video Processing.
In 1975 he co-established the Signal and Image Processing Laboratory (SIPL), at the Technion, and has since served as its academic head. The lab is active in research and education in a wide range of signal processing topics, including processing of speech, audio, image, video, physiological signals, hyperspectral images, 3D point clouds processing, computer vision, machine earning, deep neural networks, and more.
From 2006 to 2010 he served as the Director of the Center for Communication and Information Technologies – CCIT, at the EE Department, Technion. This center hosts the EE Dept. Industrial Liason Program (ILP).
He served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Visual Communication and Image representation, from 1999 to 2012, and during 2010-2011 on the Senior Editorial Board of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal processing.
He is a recipient of the 2007 International IBM Faculty Award, while collaborating with IBM’s Haifa Research Lab in Israel in the development of a small footprint Text-to-Speech (TTS) Synthesis system.
He is also a recipient of the 2011 Outstanding Achievement Award from his Alma Mater – the University of Minnesota.
In 2020 he received the IEEE SPS Sustained Impact Paper Award for the paper:
“Speech Enhancement Using a Minimum Mean Square Error Short-Time Spectral Amplitude Estimator”, IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, December 1984.
He became a Fellow of the IEEE in 1987 for the development of Time-Domain Harmonic Scaling and its applications, and since 2009 he is a Life Fellow of the IEEE.
His main research interests are in Image, Video, Speech and Audio Coding; Speech and Image Enhancement; Text to Speech Synthesis; Hyperspectral Image Analysis; Data Embedding in Signals, 3D Point Cloud Processing, and in Digital Signal Processing Techniques. So far he supervised 86 M.Sc. and Ph.D. students in the lab.
