Oral-History:Russell Mersereau
About Russell Mersereau
Merserau went to MIT for his undergraduate (Electrical Engineering, 1968), graduate, and post-doctoral years, from 1964 to 1975. He then went to work at Georgia Tech, where he has taught ever since. His Masters work was on statistical correlations on electrocardiographical cardiac data. He then took a course with Allen Oppenheim that propelled him into the field of digital signal processing. His doctoral work, on building multidimensional images from projections of two-dimensional objects, resulted in the dissertation, “The Reconstruction of Multidimensional Signals from their Projections.” As a post-doc, he wrote a Thompson Award-winning paper (1975) with Dan Dudgeon on multidimensional digital filter design. (Dudgeon has tended to apply the work to sonar array processing, Merserau to (medical) imaging.) He also briefly worked with Wolfgang Mecklenbrauker and Tom Quatieri on multidimensional digital filters. At Georgia Tech he co-wrote a textbook with Dan Dudgeon on two dimensional digital signal processing. His research has included hexagonal sampling, iterative signal restoration algorithms, image restoration, image modeling, two-stage multirate coding of color images, and video coding. But he spends more time producing students than producing research.
He describes the growth of the Georgia Tech digital signal processing group (from Merserau, Ron Schafer, and Tom Barnwell to 10 faculty); notes that the professors were more collaborative than most departments (partly for lack of graduate students to work with), and more focused on the group’s collective progress; had relatively little high-tech industry locally to work with; and has innovated in its digital signal processing curriculum. He notes the ballooning of publication makes it harder to keep up with the field in general; he believes the Signal Processing Society works pretty well.
About the Interview
RUSSELL MERSEREAU: An Interview Conducted by Frederik Nebeker, IEEE History Center, 6 October 1998
Interview #346 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Russell Mersereau, an oral history conducted in 1998 by Frederik Nebeker, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
Interview
Interview: Russell Mersereau
Interviewer: Frederik Nebeker
Date: 6 October 1998
Place: Chicago, Illinois
