Technical Committee News

Synthetic attendance--immersive communications with people in a meeting happening afar--has been one of mankind's elusive dreams. The Exploratory DSP column of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (November 2009) discusses critical questions in immersive communications that are still awaiting resolution.

JPEG XR is the newest image coding standard from the JPEG committee. It primarily targets the representation of continuous-tone still images such as photographic images, and achieves high image quality, on par with JPEG 2000, while requiring low computational resources and storage capacity.

The Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) Technical Committee addresses the areas of sensor array and multi-channel statistical signal processing, with main application areas focusing on radar, sonar, wireless communications, microphone array processing, navigation, seismology, radio astronomy, and biomedicine. At ICASSP 2009, the SAM TC collaborated with the SPTM and SPCOM TCs to organize a Thematic Symposium on Network Distributed Signal Processing; Harry Van Trees nominated by the SAM TC received SPS Technical Achievement Award. The SAM TC participated in its first TC review by the Signal Processing Society and adopted formal Bylaws.

The Signal Processing Theory and Methods Technical Committee (SPTM TC) promotes activities in the technical areas of theory and methods of digital and statistical signal processing. The 2009 edition of the TC-sponsored IEEE Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing was held in Cardiff, UK in September 2009. The event was very well attended with almost 250 attendees, who enjoyed six keynote talks from leading international researchers. The 14th IEEE SPS Workshop on DSP and SP Education will take place in Sedona, Arizona, USA in 2010.