Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, died on 7 May. He was 91.
Liu was widely regarded as one of the founders of modern digital signal processing, a field that applies mathematical algorithms to analyze, modify, and transmit signals including sound, images, and video.
The IEEE Life Fellow taught electrical engineering at Princeton for more than 50 years. From 1994 to 1997, he chaired the university’s electrical and computer engineering department.
Liu’s research aided the transition from analog to digital processing of sound, images, and video. His work helped establish many of the mathematical and engineering techniques that underpin modern communications, multimedia systems, and consumer electronics.
Although little known outside engineering circles, his work is embedded in technologies used by billions of people. The low-power digital signal processors that make cellphone calls, streaming video, and Internet communications possible can be traced to research he conducted in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Liu received the 2018 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for “sustained contributions to the analysis and the development of low-complexity realizations of digital signal processing algorithms.”
“We stream music and video. We take photos with our phones, and we send them around. We don’t even think about it,” IEEE Life Fellow H. Vincent Poor said in an obituary for Liu. “But it’s all because of the signal processing, image processing, and video processing that’s been developed over the years, as well as other technologies that have grown up beside it and enabled it, like semiconductors. The development of these processing advances was exactly what Bede was a major part of.” Poor is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton.
An impactful scholar and teacher
Liu was born in Shanghai in 1934. During his childhood, his family relocated to Taiwan amid the upheaval of the Chinese Civil War. His father, Henry Liu Sr., was an electrical engineer.
Liu earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1954 from the National Taiwan University, in Taipei. After graduating, he and his family moved to the United States. Liu and his father attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering) together. They earned their master’s degrees in electrical engineering in 1956. Liu continued his studies at the school, earning a doctoral degree in electrical engineering four years later.
In 1959 he was awarded a Bell Labs fellowship and worked at the company’s Murray Hill, N.J., location until he joined Princeton in 1962.
“Liu was a highly impactful scholar and teacher—always thinking ahead of future needs and changing technologies,” said IEEE Life Fellow Peter J. Ramadge, a Princeton professor emeritus of engineering.
Cellphones make use of a considerable amount of digital signal processing, Liu once noted. Many of the field’s advances, he added, involved making sophisticated processing practical on devices with limited computing power—which is the challenge that confronted generations of engineers designing portable electronics.
Liu’s research contributions helped shape both the theory and practice of digital signal processing. With Abe Peled, a former graduate student, he authored the 1976 textbook Digital Signal Processing: Theory, Design, and Implementation, which is a standard reference for engineers. Published before digital signal processing had fully emerged as a distinct discipline, it helped define the subject for practitioners and students around the world.
Liu also published 250 technical papers and was granted 12 U.S. patents. His papers are available to read on the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.
The first patent granted to him and Peled was in 1976 for a hardware design that processed bits in parallel, rather than in sequence. The innovation greatly increased computing efficiency for data including sound and communication signals.
Peled says Liu “demonstrated an openness to new ideas and a willingness to challenge the orthodoxy of the EE department at that time—which leaned heavily toward more theoretical information theory.”
A mentor to well-known engineers
Liu’s influence extended beyond his own research. He advised 53 doctoral students, many of whom went on to distinguished careers in academia and industry, including leadership positions at Google and IBM. One former student, computer scientist Robert Kahn, helped create the architecture of the modern Internet. Kahn, an IEEE Life Fellow, received the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor.
“His former students were very successful,” Poor said of Liu, “and I think that’s a testament to his skill as a mentor.”
“Liu was a highly impactful scholar and teacher—always thinking ahead of future needs and changing technologies.”—Peter J. Ramadge
Together with several Ph.D. students, Liu developed methods of filtering and compressing digital signals to mitigate errors and dramatically reduce the computation needed for signal processing.
As digital signal processing moved from laboratories into commercial products, the impact of Liu’s ideas spread across industries. His research helped spawn the development of lower-cost and lower-power electronics and contributed to advances in mobile communications, multimedia technology, industrial automation, and biomedical imaging.
A focus on media integrity and copyrights
In the 2000s, Liu turned his attention to media integrity and copyright issues.
“With the increasing accessibility of digital media source material, the protection of ownership and the prevention of unauthorized alteration has become an important concern,” he wrote in his 2002 book, Multimedia Data Hiding. The book, which he co-wrote with his former doctoral student IEEE Fellow Min Wu, discussed the theory, techniques, applications, and security of digital watermarking—hidden signals that could identify a genuine copy of a song, image or video to prevent unauthorized distribution or tampering.
A Princeton team that included Liu, Wu, and another of his doctoral students uncovered serious vulnerabilities in watermarking technologies being considered by an industry consortium. They found that the standardization efforts were immature and would not protect against digital piracy.
“Now nearly every copy of a Hollywood film given to a critic or theater carries a unique digital forensic watermark to prevent unauthorized redistribution,” said Wu.
A force in the community
Liu, an active IEEE volunteer, served on the IEEE Board of Directors in 1984 and 1985. He was the 1982 president of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.
He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, an academician of China’s Academia Sinica, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Outside the classroom, he was recognized for his humility, humor, enthusiasm, and generosity. When thinking of Liu, IEEE Life Fellow Kenneth Steiglitz says, cheer is the first word that comes to mind.
Liu was “always ready with a positive remark, a quick smile or, maybe, some tips on the right way to cook a duck,” says Steiglitz, professor emeritus of computer science at Princeton.
Liu encouraged his students to take on ambitious, unconventional projects, and he inspired students and colleagues with his adventurous spirit.
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