Palghat P. Vaidyanathan

2024
IEEE JACK S. KILBY SIGNAL PROCESSING MEDAL

Sponsored by Apple

For contributions to multirate digital filter banks and sparse array signal processing

Palghat Vaidyanathan is among a select group of giants who have defined the field of signal processing. Indeed, he is unique in that he heavily influenced and defined not one, but two areas of the field: multirate signal processing research and sparse array signal processing. Vaidyanathan is arguably the leading pioneer in multirate signal processing research. He is credited with discovering almost all of the key results in the field and his work has defined the research directions in filter banks and multirate systems for over two decades. His 1987 award-winning paper was the first to establish a simple condition that leads to the perfect reconstruction property. The condition simplified the design of filter banks and opened up their use in a variety of applications, from communications to pipeline implementations of digital signal processing structures. Vaidyanathan later built on this foundational work to develop the most impactful results in the field, including the development of the theory of paraunitary filter banks, lattice structures and unitary parameterizations of orthonormal filter banks. Vaidyanathan is also arguably responsible for establishing co-prime and nested array signal processing as a powerful mainstream approach to array processing. His work led to major research initiatives from federal funding agencies. His paper “Nested arrays: a novel approach to array processing with enhanced degrees of freedom” remains a classic in the field. He showed in that paper one could localize more sources than array elements, a feat that was unmatched up to that point and revolutionized the field overnight.

An IEEE Life Fellow and Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, Vaidyanathan is the Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA.

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