K. R. Rao

Kamisetty Ramamohan Rao is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington (UT Arlington). He is credited with the co-invention of discrete cosine transform (DCT), along with N. Ahmed and T. Natarajan due to their landmark publication, N. Ahmed, T. Natarajan, and K. R. Rao, "Discrete Cosine Transform", IEEE Transactions on Computers, 90–93, Jan 1974.

Rao is alumnus of Sainik School, Korukonda.

Education

Rao received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (E. E.) from the College of Engineering, Guindy, affiliated with the University of Madras, India in 1952. In 1959, he received his M.S.E.E degree from University of Florida followed by an M.S.NuE from the University of Florida in 1960. He received the Ph.D. degree in E. E. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1966.

Work at UTA

Rao has been with the University of Texas at Arlington since 1966. He is currently a professor of electrical engineering, and the director of the Multimedia Processing Laboratory. He also teaches undergraduate courses on Discrete Signals and Systems and Fundamentals of Telecommunication systems. He also teaches graduate courses on Digital Video Coding, Digital Image Processing, Discrete Transforms and Multimedia Processing.

He has been an external examiner for graduate students from Universities in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan. He was a visiting professor in several Universities – 3 weeks to 7 and 1/2 months – (Australia, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Thailand). He has conducted workshops/tutorials on video/audio coding/standards worldwide. He has supervised several students at the Masters (90) and Doctoral (31) levels. He has published extensively in refereed journals and has been a consultant to industry, research institutes, law firms and academia.

In 2011, Dr Rao reached an academic milestone, supervising his 100th Graduate Student.

He has been a plenary/keynote speaker in several international conferences.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Scholars, UTA. He was invited to be panelist for the 2011 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), with service on the Electrical Engineering Panel. He was a panelist for the US EPA STAR fellowship program, 14–15 March 2013, Chantilly, VA.

Discrete cosine transform

He, along with two other researchers, N. Ahmed and T. Natarajan, introduced the discrete cosine transform (DCT) in 1975 which has since become very popular in digital signal processing. DCT, INTDCT, directional DCT and MDCT (modified DCT) have been adopted in several international video/image/audio coding standards such as JPEG/MPEG/H.26X series and also by SMPTE (VC-1)and by AVS China.

Publications

He is the co-author of the books Orthogonal Transforms for Digital Signal Processing (Springer-Verlag, 1975), Also recorded for the blind in Braille by the Royal Institute for the blind. Fast Transforms: Analyses and Applications (Academic Press, 1982), and Discrete Cosine Transform-Algorithms, Advantages, Applications (Academic Press, 1990).

• He has edited a benchmark volume, Discrete Transforms and Their Applications (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1985).
• He has coedited a benchmark volume, Teleconferencing (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1985).
• He is co-author of Techniques and standards for Image/Video/Audio Coding (Prentice Hall) 1996 “Packet video communications over ATM networks”(Prentice Hall) 2000
• He is also the co-author of Multimedia communication systems (Prentice Hall) 2002.
• He has coedited a handbook The transform and data compression handbook, ( CRC Press, 2001).
• He is co-author of Digital video image quality and perceptual coding, (with H.R. Wu) (Taylor and Francis 2006).
• He is co-author of Introduction to multimedia communications: applications, middleware, networking, (with Z.S. Bojkovic and D.A. Milovanovic), Wiley, (2006).
• He has also published a book, Discrete cosine and sine transforms, with V. Britanak and P. Yip (Elsevier 2007).
• He has also published a book, Wireless Multimedia Communications (publisher: Taylor and Francis) Nov. 2008.
• He is co-author of Fast Fourier Transform: algorithms and Application, with D. Kim and J.J. Hwang (publisher: Springer) 2010. (Alsor e-book). Also into Chinese by China Machine Press. Also Asian edition (paperback) by Springer India. Also into Korean by A-Jin publishing company.

Some of his books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian and also published as Asian (paperback) editions (also as e-books).

The book Video coding standards: AVS China, H.264/MPEG-4 Part10, HEVC, VP6, DIRAC and VC-1, (with D. Kim and J.J. Hwang) Springer is set to be published in 2014.

Areas of expertise

• Digital signal and image processing. Data compression by various techniques for digital transmission or storage of audio and video at reduced rates.

See also

• JPEG – Contains an easier to understand example of DCT transformation
• Modified discrete cosine transform
• Discrete sine transform
• Discrete Fourier transform
• List of Fourier-related transforms

References

• N. Ahmed, T. Natarajan, and K. R. Rao, "Discrete Cosine Transform", IEEE Trans. Computers, 90–93, Jan 1974.

External links

1. Books by Dr Rao, Books
2. IEEE Fellow Citation (He was elected Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to the theory and practice of image and video compression.)
3. Dr Rao's faculty page at UTA,
4. Multimedia Processing Lab's page at UTA