[1] In 1966, while studying his PhD at Nagoya, he developed the earliest concepts for what would later become known as linear predictive coding (LPC), along with Shuzo Saito from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT).
[4] In 1975, Itakura developed the line spectral pairs (LSP) method for high-compression speech coding, while at NTT.
[7] Itakura's work on spectral and formant estimation laid the foundation for much of the early progress in speech signal processing.
[10][11] In 2009, he received the NEC C&C Prize for his pioneering research and the development of highly efficient voice-coding technology with analysis-synthesis methods for speech.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE for pioneering contributions to speech processing,[12] and an honorary member the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan.