Sadaoki Furui

Biography

A leader in the field of speech processing for nearly two decades, IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Sadaoki Furui played an important role in improving natural communication between humans and machines in today’s “voice activated” world. Best known for investigating human perception of transient sounds during the 1980s, gaining an important understanding of human hearing, Furui provided the first quantifiable measurement of the importance of spectral transition upon intelligibility. By incorporating spectral derivatives, also known as “delta cepstra,” the accuracy of speech recognition systems was greatly improved. Most of today’s practical speech recognition, speaker identification and verification systems incorporate this concept. Furui was a leader in the field and he oversaw a Japanese national project whose goal was to develop a system for automatic understanding and summarization of spontaneous speech.

An IEEE Fellow, Dr. Furui was a professor with the Department of Computer Science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan.