Anil K. Jain (January 21, 1946 – November 14, 1988)Anil K Jain Obituary, November 1988
The Regents of The University of California, 2011. was an Indian-American

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

and Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the

University of California, Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The inst ...

, known for his contributions on "two-dimensional stochastic models for images provided a firm theoretical foundation for a number of algorithms of spectral analysis, adaptive image estimation and image data compression", including work on

transform coding Transform coding is a type of data compression for "natural" data like audio signals or photographic images. The transformation is typically lossless (perfectly reversible) on its own but is used to enable better (more targeted) quantization, ...

for

image compression Image compression is a type of data compression applied to digital images, to reduce their cost for storage or transmission. Algorithms may take advantage of visual perception and the statistical properties of image data to provide superior re ...

and block-based

motion compensation Motion compensation in computing, is an algorithmic technique used to predict a frame in a video, given the previous and/or future frames by accounting for motion of the camera and/or objects in the video. It is employed in the encoding of video d ...

for

video compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...

in particular.

Biography

Born in India, Jain received a bachelor's degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

in 1967 at the

Indian Institute of Technology The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are central government owned public technical institutes located across India. They are under the ownership of the Ministry of Education of the Government of India. They are governed by the Insti ...

in Kharagpur, and a master's degree in 1969 and Ph.D. in 1970 from the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The University of ...

. He had conducted his doctoral research at the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8.1 ...

under guidance of

Richard Bellman Richard Ernest Bellman (August 26, 1920 – March 19, 1984) was an American applied mathematician, who introduced dynamic programming in 1953, and made important contributions in other fields of mathematics, such as biomathematics. He founde ...

. After graduation Jain continued as postdoctoral fellow and later assistant professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and in the Image Processing Institute of the University of Southern California. In 1974 he joined the faculty of the

State University of New York at Buffalo The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 1846 ...

, and in 1978 he returned to California and became a professor at the University of California, Davis. In 1983 Jain received the IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award. In 1988 Jain was recognized as a

Fellow of the IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

Work

Jain's research interests ranged from "digital and image processing, computer vision, fast algorithms, real time digital systems architecture to stochastic processes and communication theory."

Image processing textbook

Jain wrote an influential textbook, ''Fundamentals of Image Processing'', published in 1988 by

Prentice Hall Prentice Hall was an American major educational publisher owned by Savvas Learning Company. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market, and distributes its technical titles through the Safari ...

().

Video compression

Anil K. Jain was a contributor to the field of motion video compression. With his colleague Jaswant R. Jain, Anil published the original paper combining block-based motion compensation and transform coding in December 1981. Subsequently, most of the video compression standards for two-way communications and video broadcast applications were based upon motion compensation and transform coding, including those most widely used today such as

MPEG-1 MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to about 1.5 Mbit/s (26:1 and 6:1 compression ratios respectively) without excessive quality loss, making ...

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, ...

(used on DVDs) and the most common Internet video H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.

Optivision and its transform coding products

While at

, Jain co-founded Optivision, Inc. in the mid-1980s with Professor Joseph GoodmanProfessor Joseph Goodman
from Stanford. Optivision pioneered both

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

transform coding products for picture capture systems such as for the

California Department of Motor Vehicles The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is the state agency that registers motor vehicles and boats and issues driver licenses in the U.S. state of California. It regulates new car dealers (through the New Motor Vehicle Board), c ...

, and video compression systems such as

videoconferencing Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio signal, audio and video signals by people in different locations for Real-time, real time communication. ...

that used the block-based motion-compensated transform coding techniques he developed. Jain's work also inspired other video industry entrepreneurs such as

Brian Hinman Brian L. Hinman (born August 22, 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland) is an entrepreneur and investor in high technology businesses, especially the computer-based communications industry. Hinman founded three successful (annual revenues greater than $500 ...

, co-founder of PictureTel,

Polycom Poly, formerly Polycom, a part of HP Inc., is an American multinational corporation that develops video, voice and content collaboration and communication technology. Polycom was co-founded in 1990 by Brian L Hinman and Jeffrey Rodman. In 2018 ...

, and

2Wire 2Wire, Inc., was (between 1998 and 2010) a home networking Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) manufacturer that provided telecommunications companies with hardware, software, service platforms, and remote CPE management systems. The company was hea ...

. Optivision later, after Jain's untimely death, had an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

primarily thanks to the Optivision optical switching technology.

References

External links

Anil K Jain
Obituary, November 1988 {{DEFAULTSORT:Jain, Anil K. 1946 births 1988 deaths Video compression Fellow Members of the IEEE American Jains American academics of Indian descent University of California, Davis faculty