ABSTRACT
Peter Burt and Edward Adelson began working together while they were post-doctoral fellows living in Manhattan, with Adelson working at New York University and Burt commuting to the University of Maryland. "We were both intrigued by the multiscale ideas around at the time, like those of David Marr at M.I.T., and we had independently worked out the idea of constructing an iterative multiscale decomposition," Adelson says. "Our initial work was based on nothing more complicated than intuitions and basic algebra." Burt had introduced pyramid algorithms for machine vision; in a joint publication he and Adelson introduced the terms "Gaussian" and "Laplacian" pyramids, and showed how they could be used for image compression [Adelson, Burt]. The better-known Burt and Adelson paper on pyramid algorithms [Burt, Adelson] was published in 1983. "I suspect," one reviewer wrote, "that no one will ever use this algorithm again." Then in 1986, working with Eero Simoncelli (then a summer student at RCA Labs, now at M.I.T.), Adelson constructed orthogonal pyramids [Adelson et al.], "and later learned that we had re-invented quadrature mirror filters." In 1989 Adelson and Simoncelli received a patent for the use of the transform in image data compression. "The patent is held by GE-having acquired RCA-and may well cover most wavelet-based image coding," Adelson says. "But I don't know if GE is aware of it." (Others question to what extent the patent could apply to such encoding.)
