Sensing Trends at ICASSP 2011: Expert Summaries of Current Trends Presented by TCs

The 36th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2011) was held at the Prague Congress Centre (PCC), May 22-27, 2011. As the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. For ICASSP 2011, 2946 paper submissions (which is probably an all-time high) were received, representing an increase of 5% over last year and 12% over two years ago.  In total, 1438 papers were accepted and organized into 168 technical sessions, including 60 oral sessions and 108 poster sessions. ICASSP 2011 also featured 4 world-class plenary speakers, 14 tutorials, and 12 Show-and-Tell demonstrations. ICASSP 2011 also presented best student paper awards to 6 students who are first authors. For more information about the technical program please visit the ICASSP 2011 website.

This year's ICASSP introduced a new type of event in its technical program, namely Trends in Signal Processing. In total, all 13 sessions were held during lunch time from Wednesday till Friday, and lasted 30 minutes. In a session, a Technical Committee of the Signal Processing Society featured a few expert summaries that highlighted the most significant advances and upcoming trends within the TC's area over the past year. These “Trends in Signal Processing” sessions were well attended by enthusiastic audiences, e.g. we observed around 200 attendees when personally attending one session. Many interesting comments were made in the panel discussion moderated by the TC chair.

The expert summaries presented in these “Trends in Signal Processing” sessions will later be published in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.   In order to provide a better grasp on what was happening in these Trends sessions to the interested readers who were not able to attend these sessions in person, the Associate Editor of the Inside Signal Processing eNewsletter approached some of the selected experts so that they provided us the presentations of their Trends in Signal Processing session.

• Trends in Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing

Moderator: Gaurav Sharma (Presentation file: TrendsinIVMSPIntros)

Introduction: Are we really "Swimming in sensors and drowning in data", (A. Deptula, 2009)? Is "Water, water, everywhere/ nor any drop to drink", (S. Coleridge, 1798) an even more apt analogy? We argue that, faced with ever-increasing data rates across a range of scientific, engineering, and consumer applications, the signal processing community is forced to consider new paradigms for high-dimensional data analysis and understanding. As illustrative examples we discuss current trends in 3-D video processing, the analysis of signals that can be represented as graphs, and the mathematics of non-Euclidean data analysis that will be required to drive future developments in signal processing for "big data".

• Trends in Machine Learning for Signal Processing

Moderator: Kostas Diamantaras
Introduction: By putting the accent on "learning" from the data and the environment, the MLSP TC provides the essential bridge between the machine learning and signal processing communities. MLSP techniques have always been attractive solutions for traditional signal processing applications such as pattern recognition, speech, audio, and video processing. More importantly, owing to their polyvalent nature, these methods are also primary candidates for a new wave of emerging applications such as brain-computer interface, multimodal data fusion and processing, behavior and emotion recognition, and learning in environments such as social networks. At this session, we will discuss the role MLSP plays in such emerging applications as well as major paradigm shifts in learning as demonstrated by cognitive systems. We shall also explore what these paradigm shifts offer for the signal processing community.

• Trends in Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing

Moderator: Mats Viberg
Introduction: Sensor arrays are becoming ubiquitous across a broad swath of signal processing applications, and this trend is accelerating in new directions and dimensions. The panelists will outline these trends, including distributed arrays and networks, and highlight recent signal processing advances and open issues.

• Trends in Multimedia Signal Processing

Moderator: Philip A. Chou
Introduction: Pushed by the tremendous technological and societal changes of the last decade, multimedia is more and more emerging as the cornerstone of next generation ICT. Mobile devices, sensors, embedded systems, high-performance computing, broadband networks, 3D, are some of the technologies that are pervading a generation of users that are more and more exigent and proactive. Evolving from a simple integration of existing technologies to a mutually-aware, interdisciplinary, development of new technologies is the biggest challenge of the Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) community. After introducing the technological and societal trends that have an impact on our work, we will list some of the most promising research trends that have recently emerged in MMSP.

• Trends in Signal Processing Education

Moderator: Wayne Padgett
Introduction: This is an exciting time for signal processing education. Many SP educators are breaking out of the standard practice of chalk and talk lectures and weekly homeworks/labs and experimenting with more interactive and immersive teaching techniques. In this talk, we'll review some of the recent progress and future trends in SP education through a range of different initiatives, including (i) Connexions open-source textbook and peer evaluation system (IEEEcnx.org), (ii) open problem and answer databases, (iii) interactive simulations and video tutorials of SP concepts, (iv) machine-learning driven personalized learning systems, and (v) the Signal Processing Education Network (SPEN).

• Trends in Bio Imaging and Signal Processing

Moderator: Jean-Christophe Olivo-Marin
Introduction: Increasingly sophisticated imaging devices and protocols are now being developed for biological and medical imaging. Understanding functional and pathological mechanisms in patients or model organisms indeed requires being able to visualize and measure in vivo and in situ at scales ranging from sub-cellular to whole body. This session will present latest developments in this area of research that has sparked a full array of challenging topics for the signal and image processing community.

• Trends in Signal Processing Theory and Methods

Moderator: Abdelhak Zoubir
Introduction: The scope of the Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) Technical Committee (TC) has a broad span, ranging from digital filtering and adaptive signal processing to statistical signal analysis, estimation and detection. These areas continue to play a key role in classical and timely applications. Under the unifying theme "how can simple local behavior generate rational global behavior," the panelists will discuss the role of signal processing in networks and its power to solving timely problems. Topics, including distributed cognitive and bio-inspired processing, in-network adaptation and learning, game theory, distributed and social learning in signal processing will be discussed. The session promises to spark interest in a wide range of new and challenging advances in statistical signal processing.

• Trends in Information Forensics and Security

Moderator: Mauro Barni (Presentation .pdf file: Exp-8_IFS_intro)
Introduction: The history of the IFS TC is strongly tied to the surge in watermarking and stegonagraphy research that started in the mid-nineties. The expectations were high: watermarking was scheduled to solve every possible multimedia security problem. Looking back, those expectations were clearly naive. Also, the multimedia security community realized that there is a larger arsenal than just watermarking and stegonagraphy, and reflecting this, the IFS TC was founded on a much broader scope than just watermarking. Topics such as robust (perceptual) hashing, traitor tracing, homomorphic encryption, DRM, secure biometrics and many more are now within the domain of IFS. In this panel session we discuss to what the future of IFS should be. Should we keep on focussing on watermarking and stego? What is the relevance of new kids on the block? Do we expect major breakthroughs in any of them? What research topics should we focus on?

• Trends in Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing

Moderator: Walter Kellermann
Introduction: Audio Ergo Sum - We are surrounded by sound and each space we occupy has characteristic acoustic properties. Whether for music, telecommunications or a host of other applications, capturing, rendering and processing sound is crucial to human existence. Audio and acoustic signal processing targets single and multichannel processing techniques and leverages classification technology, adaptive signal processing, system identification, wave field techniques and machine learning to name but a few of the exciting challenges with the scope of this vibrant and growing topic.

• Trends in Signal Processing Applications and Industry Technology

Moderator: Fa-Long Luo
Introduction: Will the next generation Smartphone be that single essential device with High Definition Wide Dynamic Range 3D and gesture recognition engines running augmented reality applications with the help of the cloud? Perception is a many-layered process and signal processing is essential to extracting world models from sensor outputs. What are the emerging signal processing techniques for perception in autonomous systems such as robots?

• Trends in Speech and Spoken Language Processing

Moderator: John H. Hansen
Speakers: Junlan Feng, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, and Jason D. Williams
Introduction: The past few years have been an exciting time for speech and language processing technology. Speech recognition is now standard in major mobile phone operating systems, and has more users than ever. New computer models such as cloud computing enable models of unprecedented scale and accuracy to be widely deployed. With a wide range of applications ranging from simple search to complex ones involving understanding, dialog interaction, information extraction, translation and speech synthesis, new paradigms have evolved to address their speed and accuracy requirements. This talk will look at some of the technical developments underpinning these recent developments, and look ahead to current work which promises to enable the next wave of innovations in accuracy and scale for speech and language processing.

• Trends in Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems

Moderator: Wonyong Sung
Introduction: The platform of Digital Signal Processing played an important role for driving the progressing in signal processing applications including wireline/wireless communication, multimedia processing, speech coding, recognition, synthesis, audio processing and graphics in the past decades. Due to the progressing from semiconductor technology, DSP platform is getting more powerful and complex and still plays as the driving force to enable dramatic applications in the efficiency and effectiveness of human life. In this talk, the trends of DiSPS including bio-medical signal processing, green technology for DSP platform and software/embedded system design methodology will be addressed.

• Trends in Signal Processing for Communications and Networking

Moderator: Geert Leus
Introduction: The area of signal processing for communications and networking (SPCOM) is shifting from a focus on the physical layer to a view that encompasses higher communication layers. Timely examples include interference management, heterogeneous networks, and cognitive radio networks. But is the physical layer really dead? What about non-traditional communication applications like underwater communications and optical communication? Are social networks and energy networks within the domain of SPCOM? Do new algorithmic techniques like compressive sampling have a future in SPCOM?