Cairo, Egypt, will host the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) on 7-11 November 2009. This is the first time that ICIP will be held in the Middle East and only the second time that any major IEEE Signal Processing Society conference is taking place in this region (the first was ICASSP 2000 that took place in Istanbul, Turkey). ICIP 2009 is one of the main SPS efforts to reach out and has received a large number of paper submissions with a wide geographical diversity. Learn more from this Conference Spotlight article in the September 2009 issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine about the magnificent program that the ICIP 2009 team is shaping up.