Linear Predictive Coding - Early History of LPC

Early History of LPC

According to Robert M. Gray of Stanford University, the first ideas leading to LPC started in 1966 when S. Saito and F. Itakura of NTT described an approach to automatic phoneme discrimination that involved the first maximum likelihood approach to speech coding. In 1967, John Burg outlined the maximum entropy approach. In 1969 Itakura and Saito introduced partial correlation, May Glen Culler proposed realtime speech encoding, and B. S. Atal presented an LPC speech coder at the Annual Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. In 1971 realtime LPC using 16-bit LPC hardware was demonstrated by Philco-Ford; four units were sold.

In 1972 Bob Kahn of ARPA, with Jim Forgie (Lincoln Laboratory, LL) and Dave Walden (BBN Technologies), started the first developments in packetized speech, which would eventually lead to Voice over IP technology. In 1973, according to Lincoln Laboratory informal history, the first realtime 2400 bit/s LPC was implemented by Ed Hofstetter. In 1974 the first realtime two-way LPC packet speech communication was accomplished over the ARPANET at 3500 bit/s between Culler-Harrison and Lincoln Laboratories. In 1976 the first LPC conference took place over the ARPANET using the Network Voice Protocol, between Culler-Harrison, ISI, SRI, and LL at 3500 bit/s. And finally in 1978, Vishwanath et al. of BBN developed the first variable-rate LPC algorithm.