Ten Emerging Signal Processing Applications & Perspectives of the IDSP-SC

Contributed by Fa-Long Luo (Chaiman of the IDSP-SC and Liaison to eNews)

As outlined in my presentation at one of the Expert Sessions at ICASSP 2011, the Industry DSP Technology Standing Committee (IDSP-SC) is now focusing on emerging signal processing applications and technologies from industry and practice perspectives. The following ten emerging applications describe our future emphasis on various activities such as publications, conferences, standardization and product development. But before listing these ten applications, it should be noted that the IEEE Signal Processing Society has now a flagship conference, the IEEE International Conference on Emerging Signal Processing Applications (IEEE ESPA), which is co-located with one of the largest annual events: the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at Las Vegas at the beginning of each January. The first edition of ESPA was held 12-14 January 2012 with great success.

1. M2M Signal Processing: Machine to Machine (also referred to as “Internet of things”) will make many kinds of devices and places be universally IP-enabled and make them become an integral part of the internet. Smart grid is an excellent representative case of M2M in practice. Signal processing will play a very important role in embedded and connected technology such as information capturing, data sensing, and signal transmission of M2M infrastructure.
2. Display Signal Processing: New display technology for consumer electronics such as OLED (organic light-emitting diode) offers many advantages over traditional ones and will greatly increase the use of signal processing in related areas such as color processing, signal sampling, and high-speed implementation.
3. Social Signal Processing: The related topics in this new application area include, but are not limited to, social networking, E-health, E-learning, telemedicine, social intelligence, social cognition, behavior modeling and analysis, security and forensics, privacy, and trust.
4. Green Signal Processing: Power-efficiency is becoming the first priority of many practical applications from broadband wireless to LCD based lighting devices. To achieve this goal, research and development of new signal processing algorithms, processing platforms, and system integration are highly desirable.
5. Smart Signal Processing: In additional to machine-learning based intelligent processing, smart signal processing involves multi-layer, multi-mode, multi-application and multi-band for the entire system in both software and hardware. With smart signal processing, smart phones, smart TV, smart appliances, smart home, smart school, and smart city are gradually becoming real.
6. Cloud Signal Processing: Cloud and service computing remain the top applications of signal processing with algorithms and real-time implementations for compression, coding, storage, security, privacy and IP management, communication and streaming (ultrahigh bandwidth), modeling, and evaluation for quality of service and experience.
7. 3D Signal Processing: In addition to 3D video, 3D audio and 3D TV, 3D signal processing will also bring new 3D technologies and applications to practice such as 3D circuits, 3D printing, 3D holographic projections, and imaging.
8. Mobile Signal Processing: This area deals with not only with handheld devices but also with vehicle and transportation applications. The new topics related to signal processing include mobile broadcasting, mobile broadband Internet, 4G and beyond, mobile cloud, navigation, location based services (LBS), and safety altering services.
9. Digital RF Processing: One of the biggest technology trends in wireless broadband, radar, sonar, and broadcasting systems is digital and software radio frequency (RF) processing. This application area covers a broad range of topics from signal processing algorithms to system integration including digital up/down conversion, high-frequency (RF range) conversion between analog and digital signals, and numerical controlled oscillators.
10. Terahertz Signal Processing: Targeting the frequency range from 300GHz to 10 THz, Terahertz technology will greatly change the landscape of signal processing applications and pose big challenges for the signal processing community from algorithm development, real-time implementation, and system integration.

To better promote these applications and bring them to practice, IDSP-SC has recently formed six sub-committees from various aspects and different functions. To anyone who is interested in becoming involved with or contributing to these sub-committees, please contact the current chairman of IDSP-SC via email.