Ali H. Sayed (VP-Publications), Jarmo Takala (DISPS TC), Anthony Vetro (MMSP TC), and H. Vicky Zhao (E-News Correspondent).
 

About the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter

Since April 2007, the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine has introduced a new form of publication - the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter.  This monthly electronic newsletter will complement the bi-monthly Magazine to serve the members in the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS).  Through email notification and expanded coverage on its website, the E-Newsletter will provide members with timely updates on:

• society and technical committee news,

• conference and publication opportunities, new books, and Ph.D. theses,

• signal processing related research opportunities, and

• activities in industry consortiums, local chapters, and government programs.

The Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter is a gateway to reach out to signal processing professionals around the world.  We invite you to contribute and share your news with tens of thousands of SPS members through this monthly electronic publication with fast turn-around cycle. IEEE members may manage their subscription of the email notification of the E-Newsletter and related SPS announcements at this page.  Please bookmark <http://enews.ieee-spm.org> for current and archived issues of the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter.

Submission Instructions  - Contribution for the next issue is due July 20, 2009

Visit the web submission site to provide your input. Make sure that you include your name, affiliation, email and phone contact information. Contributions submitted by July 20, 2009 will be considered for inclusion in the next issue of the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter. Please contact the Associate Editors of the corresponding sections as listed below if you have questions. Your comments and suggestions on the new submission system are welcome.

Contact Information of the E-Newsletter Team

  Min Wu, SPM Area Editor for E-Newsletter, University of Maryland, College Park, USA (minwu AT umd.edu)

  Huaiyu Dai, Associate Editor, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA (huaiyu_dai AT ncsu.edu)
     Conference and publication news (including new books)

  Pascal Frossard, Associate Editor, EPFL, Switzerland (pascal.frossard AT epfl.ch)
     News and activities of SPS Technical Committees, industry consortiums and international standards

  Alessandro Piva, Associate Editor, University of Florence, Italy (alessandro.piva AT unifi.it)
     News and activities in local chapters and research groups (including new Ph.D. theses & research opportunities)

  Nitin Chandrachoodan, Digital Production Editor, Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (nitin AT ee.iitm.ac.in)
     Online submission and production system

  Li Deng, SPM Editor-in-Chief, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA (deng AT microsoft.com)

  * Please replace "AT" in the email addresses with @.

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2009:  May'09     April'09      March'09      February'09      January'09

2008:  November-December'08    October'08     September'08     July-August'08      June'08

          May'08        April'08         March'08         January-February'08  

2007:  December'07  November'07  October'07  August-September'07  July'07  June'07  May'07  April'07
 

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In-Depth E-News Article

Introducing Overview Articles in Signal Processing Transactions by Ali H. Sayed  (SPS Vice President-Publications)

The IEEE Signal Processing Society is introducing a new feature which originated from a suggestion made by my colleague Athina Petropulu and a couple of Associate Editors. The publication of overview articles in the Transactions will be a service to our readers and appeal to the broad signal processing audience.

What are Overview Articles?
Overview articles are intended to be of solid technical depth with lasting value and provide advanced readers with a thorough overview of a field of interest. They are technically more comprehensive than tutorials, which are intended for readers with a basic knowledge in a given field. Tutorials are currently published in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. Overview articles are similar in depth to articles published in the Proceedings of the IEEE. They are expected to be longer in length than regular articles in the transactions and their length can be as much as double the length of a regular submission.

Which Transactions will include Overview Articles?
Overview articles will be published in the following Transactions:
    IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
    IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
    IEEE Transactions in Image Processing
    IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing

What is the Frequency?
Each of these journals will publish no more than one Overview Article per quarter or four per year.

What is the Process for Submitting an Overview Article?
Authors interested in submitting overview articles are required to consult first with the Editor-in-Chief of their transactions of choice before submitting a white paper proposal. The white paper should be submitted to the EIC. White papers are limited to 2-pages and should motivate the topic, justify the proposal, and include a list of relevant bibliography including any available tutorial or overview articles related to the subject matter. The author(s) should also attach IEEE-style bios.

How are Overview Articles Handled?
The white paper proposal is forwarded by the EIC to the Overview Editorial Board. The Board’s responsibility is to provide feedback on the article’s topic with regard to its timeliness and relevance.

Based on the feedback received from the Overview Editorial Board, the author(s) may be instructed by the EIC how to submit a full-fledged manuscript through Manuscript Central. The EIC may also determine that the overview article is more suitable to some other transactions.

All overview articles will be subjected to the same rigorous review process as all other regular submissions. It is our expectation that the time from submission to publication of accepted overview articles will not exceed one year.

Members of the Overview Editorial Board
The initial members of the Overview Editorial Board are: M. Amin, A. Bovik, R. Calderbank, S-F. Chang, R. De Mori, E. Delp, B. Girod, A. Jain, T. Kalker, W. Kellerman, G. Rigoll, L-S. Lee, B. Manjunath, H. Messer, H. Vince Poor, and A. Willsky. We thank them for their willingness to serve in this capacity.

More information about Overview Articles can be found at this link. We look forward to receiving your white paper proposals.

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Activity Updates from Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) Technical Committee by Anthony Vetro (MMSP TC Chair)

The Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) Technical Committee (TC) promotes the advancement of multimedia signal processing technology with special emphasis on the interaction, coordination, synchronization, and joint processing of multimedia and multi-modality signals.

A key activity of the TC is organizing the annual MMSP Workshop. The eleventh edition of this workshop will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from October 5-7, 2009. A thematic emphasis for MMSP'09 is on topics
related to multimedia processing and interaction for immersive telecommunications and collaboration. Keynote speakers include: Prof. Joseph Paradiso (MIT), who will speak on "Linking Virtual and Real
Worlds Through Ubiquitous Sensor Networks", Prof. Fred Juang, (Georgia Tech), who will present "Interactive Acoustics: A Frontier in Signal Processing for Immersive Communication" and Prof. Inald L. Lagendijk (Delft University), who will give a talk entitled "Secure Signal Processing: Merging the Worlds of Signal Processing and Cryptography". The technical program is being finalized now and we look forward to your participation in this event. Please visit http://mmsp09.org/ for further details.

The TC is also actively supporting the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), which is sponsored by four IEEE Societies including Signal Processing Society. This event was recently moved from Cancun, Mexico to New York City due to the H1N1 flu pandemic and will feature a full range of keynotes, tutorials, workshops and technical presentations on multimedia. Please visit the conference webpage for further details.

A roster of the current MMSP TC members can be found at the TC website.  Contact TC Chair Anthony Vetro <avetro AT merl.com> for more information about the TC activities and opportunities to be involved in.

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Technical Committee Updates:  Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems (DISPS) by Jarmo Takala (DISPS TC Liaison to E-News)

The history of the Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems (DISPS) Technical Committee can be traced back to 1983, when the Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Technical Committee was created.  The name of the TC was updated to its current name in 1995.  The DISPS TC promotes and supports activities of the Signal Processing Society in the several areas, including:
- design, development and implementation of signal processing systems;
- design of algorithms with implementation in mind, and
- design of software tools and methodologies to support the design of signal processing systems.

Currently, the TC has 28 members, and four new members were elected: Yen-Kuang Chen (Intel), Tokunbo Ogunfunmi (Santa Clara University), Vijay Sundararajan (Texas Instruments), and Zhiyuan Yan (Lehigh University). Retiring members are invited to the DISPS Advisory Committee, and this year Advisory Committee included three new members: Magdy A. Bayoumi (University of Louisiana), Chaitali Chakrabarti (Arizona State University), and Konstantinos Konstatinides (HP, Palo Alto, CA).

Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya (University of Maryland, College Park) is the current Chair of the DISPS Technical Committee, and Wonyong Sung (Seoul National University, Korea) was elected in March 2009 as the TC Chair Elect. An active DISPS TC member, Brian L. Evans (University of Texas at Austin), was elevated to IEEE Fellow Class of 2009.

The DISPS TC sponsors the Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS), which was organized for first time in 1984 as the Workshop on VLSI Signal Processing. The Workshop has been organized annually since 1992. The successful SiPS 2008 was held in Washington, DC, in October 2008. The SiPS 2009 will be held at Tampere, Finland in October 7-9, and SiPS 2010 is scheduled to be held in the San Francisco Bay Area. The DISPS TC recently organized the Implementation of Signal Processing Systems Track at ICASSP 2009, held in April 2009 in Taipei, Taiwan. The track consisted of 23 papers in one lecture session and two poster sessions. The recent TC meeting was held during the ICASSP 2009 (see picture below) and a major agenda item was to discuss plans and proposals for SiPS 2010.

For more information, please visit the DISPS TC's new webpage introduced in April 2009.

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Research Trends At a Glance: Information Forensics and Security Work at ICASSP 2009 by  H. Vicky Zhao (E-News Correspondent)

In ICASSP 2009, the Information Forensics and Security (IFS) Technical Track received 86 paper submissions, among which 39 were accepted. The IFS Technical Track in ICASSP 2009 included three lecture sessions and two poster sessions, and covered a wide range of topics in information forensics and security, including theoretical analysis of fundamental security problems, information protection in emerging applications, and signal processing for surveillance and forensic applications.

Information hiding remains an active research topic featured in the ICASSP's IFS Track: there were ten papers on digital watermarking, four papers on steganography and steganalysis, and four papers on traitor-tracing multimedia fingerprinting. These papers analyzed the fundamental capability of information hiding technologies, investigated potential attacks on data hiding for security applications, and introduced new techniques to improve the performance of information hiding. Also explored were new applications, for example, covert communications over queuing channels, and for new host data types, such as data hiding for electronic ink in tablet PC applications.

For forensics applications that do not rely on proactive support such as data hiding based approach, there were seven papers on passive-blind forensics (also known as nonintrusive forensics) in ICASSP 2009. Some of these papers focused on identification of the source of the digital media in question, including its origin (for example, computer graphics versus real images) and the hardware that was used to process it (such as digital camera, scanner or printer). Another research direction was tampering detection, where unique characteristics of different media types and of multimedia applications were explored to verify the authenticity of digital media documents. Examples include spectral distance and phase of electric network frequency for audio signals, empirical frequency response for images, and distributed source coding based approach for networked multimedia applications.

Data confidentiality is a critical requirement in many security applications, and there were four papers in ICASSP 2009 addressing various issues related to this area, including secret sharing for color images and secure processing of multimedia documents. Two papers addressed such application scenarios that require privacy protection without sacrificing other functionalities of multimedia systems, by studying the impact of security on other multimedia signal processing modules and by developing mechanisms for accurate matching and retrieval of digital media in the encrypted domain.

There are growing interests in accurately identifying media documents that contain identical content except some minor differences caused by such common processing as compression and resampling, and at the same time distinguishing between media documents of different content. Two papers in ICASSP 2009 explored human perceptual systems and designed content hashing technologies for robust, accurate, and efficient identification of audios and videos, respectively.

Biometrics for human identification is a crucial component in many security applications. Four ICASSP papers studied advanced signal processing techniques for enhancing biometric performance. They considered different psychological and behavioral characteristics, including electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of brain waves, humming, gait patterns, and fingerprints.

In this year’s ICASSP, there have also been extensive studies on techniques for automated analysis of surveillance videos and remote sensing data. For example, behavior analysis of moving objects by grouping motion trajectories, sweethearting identification from surveillance video to catch fraud at retail check-out counters, and wildfire detection using least-mean-square based active learning. Another interesting work presented in ICASSP was on automatic reconstruction of shredded documents based on polynomial approximation and dynamic programming in forensic document examination.

To summarize, there were interesting papers in ICASSP 2009 addressing a variety of aspects of information forensics and security, from theoretical analysis to real-world applications, from digital rights management to human identification, and from traditional digital media to new data types such as electronic ink. Information forensics and security is an interdisciplinary research area covering a wide range of disciplines, including digital signal processing, multimedia, communications, biomedical signal processing, statistics, and many others. Although IFS has received a lot of attention from both academia and industries over the past years, it is still a young, emerging, and diverse field with many unsolved problems and uncharted territories. We anticipate that IFS will remain an active research area in the coming years, and will play a crucial role in future development of information technologies.

About the Author:  H. Vicky Zhao is with the ECE Department at University of Alberta, Canada.

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