Digital encoding process
- Filed
- 26 January 1995
- Granted
- 26 November 1996
- Assignee
- Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Angewandten Forschung eV
- Co-inventors
- Bernhard Grill, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, Ernst Eberlein
Audio coding, digital communications
Karlheinz Brandenburg: inventions and patents
Known for Research behind the mp3 audio coding formatNationality Born in Erlangen, GermanyBorn 1954
Karlheinz Brandenburg is an electrical engineer whose 1989 doctoral research at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg on digital audio coding is described by his Academia Europaea CV as "the basis of MPEG-1 Layer 3 (mp3)". He continued the work with a team at Fraunhofer IIS, which produced mp3 and MPEG-2 AAC, and later became director of Fraunhofer IDMT in Ilmenau. He is a named inventor on US patent 5,579,430 for a digital encoding process, assigned to the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.2,3,1
Patents
Inventions
- mp3 (MPEG-1 Layer 3) audio coding. A perceptual audio compression scheme developed by a Fraunhofer IIS team building on his doctoral research. FAU says the work was done by virtually the entire founding team.2,3
Recognition
- 2023 Digital Processing Medal, Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE)3
Sources
- Google Patents, US5579430A Digital encoding process (accessed 2026-10-28)
- Academia Europaea, Karlheinz Brandenburg, Curriculum Vitae (accessed 2026-10-28)
- Friedrich-Alexander-Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg (FAU), Mp3 developer recognized in Hollywood for his visionary work (2 November 2023)