Standards Development in Emerging Signal Processing Applications and Technologies

By Fa-Long Luo and Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu
(Chair and Vice-Chair of the IDSP-SC)

The involvement in standards development related to emerging signal processing applications and technologies is becoming a major focus of the Industry DSP Technology Standing Committee (IDSP-SC). Targeted benefits of this involvement mainly include:

1. to better connect signal processing society with industry community through development of new standards,
2. to better bring new signal processing technology to practice and market implementation,
3. to better highlight emerging signal processing applications and contribute innovative technologies by leveraging new standards.

Like ISO and IEC, the IEEE (IEEE Standards Association - IEEE-SA) is a world-leading standards developer in a very broad range of industries and practices. An IEEE standard development processing mainly includes the following six steps: initiating a project, mobilizing the working group, drafting the standard, balloting standard, gaining the final approval and maintaining the standard. The first, but the most important step is to submit to IEEE SA Standard Board (IEEE SASB) a project proposal called the Project Authorization Request (PAR). Upon approval by the IEEE SASB, a working-group of this project could then be formed, which is comprised of individuals or representatives from organizations entities (corporations, government agencies or academic institutions). These participants must be the experts with a solid knowledge and dedicated interest in the technology being standardized. More importantly, the development of an IEEE standard requires at least one sponsor (technical) to provide the oversight of this standard and assume the responsibilities from technical perspective. This required sponsor could be either the societies (or their technical committees) of IEEE or standard coordinating committees of IEEE-SA.

With the above processing guidelines, the involvement of the IDSP-SC in the new standard developments related to emerging signal processing applications and technologies can be in the following aspects:

• To participate to the related current working groups and active development projects in IEEE-SA with IDSP-SC members as individual experts or with IDSP-SC as a required technical sponsor. In addition, IDSP-SC is also planning to participate, as a technical co-sponsor, in various standardization activities of other international organizations and industry alliances such as ISO (MPEG/JPEG), ITU, 3GPP, B4G, ETSI, etc upon the approval of SPS.
• To start new standard projects and working groups in the following ten topics of emerging signal processing applications and technologies: machine-to-machine signal processing, display signal processing, social signal processing, green signal processing, smart signal processing, cloud signal processing, 3D signal processing, mobile signal processing, digital and software RF processing and terahertz signal processing. A more detailed description about these topics can be found in our article in the last February issue of the SPS eNewsletter.
• To organize a "Signal Processing Standards in Development" annual workshop so as to conduct all our standardization activities in a more consolidated and efficient manner through new standard proposal submission, review, presentation, selection and further recommendation to IEEE-SA or other related standard developing organizations. This annual workshop is planned to be co-held with some SPS flagship conferences such as ICASSP or ESPA, which could also serve as a very good way to attract more industry participants to come to SPS events. Industry is indeed much more willing and supportive to attend standardization activities and contribute to new standard proposals than to attend academic conferences and to publish papers.

It is worth mentioning that the IDSP-SC is also proposing to add some EDICS into ICASSP and related publications of IEEE SPS by covering the ten emerging signal processing applications and technologies listed above. This adding could be implemented by simply putting these new EDICS under current Industry Technology Track or establishing another track, e.g. "Emerging Applications and Technologies Track", so as to address these new topics that other existing TCs of SPS have not covered or focused on yet.

Comments and suggestions on the above activities are highly appreciated and please send to the current chair: Fa-Long Luo or the vice chair: Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu via email. Furthermore, new ideas and initiatives are always welcome, and more importantly the annual nomination for new TC members is now open (deadline is September 30, 2012) and we are always looking for highly–qualified experts to join IDSP-SC so as to better promote signal processing technology into the industry.