Westfield resident Arun Netravali, Ph.D., president of Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, since 1999, is a leader in the field of digital technology. His 1983 patented invention, "The Video Signal Interpolation Using Motion Estimation," improved high definition television (HDTV) plus benefited the delivery of broadcast television, compact discs, digital video displays, and the Internet. The algorithmic principles he used in his patent provide the basis for coding and decoding various digital video signals.

Prior to Netravali's invention, efforts to code and transmit video in digital format encountered significant obstacles. Earlier coding algorithms obtained substantial compression ratios but created problems like blurring and other undesirable artifacts, especially in rapid motion scenes.

Netravali realized that the required transmission bandwidth for digitally coded, full-motion video could be reduced, without the loss of image quality, by computing estimates of the displacement of objects in the pictures. In particular, he showed that displacement estimates are best-formed recursively, with updates being formed only in moving areas of the picture.

Netravali received his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India, and his master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University, Houston. He holds an honorary doctorate from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne, Switzerland. The co-author of two technical books and the editor of a collection of technical papers, all about digital video, he has also written and co-authored more than 150 scholarly journal articles. He holds more than 70 patents in computers as well as digital video technology. His awards include a 1994 EMMY for the HDTV Grand Alliance and more recently in 2000, the Frederick Philips Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.