Technical Committee News

The Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee (MMSP TC) successfully organized the 2009 MMSP Workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, marking a milestone for the first time one of the major IEEE Signal Processing Society events being held in Latin America. Planning is underway for MMSP 2010, which will be held in Saint-Malo, France. The TC also invites proposals to organize the 2011 MMSP Workshop. Another major effort in 2009 that the MMSP TC is actively engaged in was to revitalize the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME) jointly organized by four IEEE societies. The TC welcomes a new Chair and eight newly elected members in January 2010.

In September 2009, USA Today and other media outlets have reported a successful servicing mission to the Hubble Space telescope. The In-the-Spotlight column in the January 2010 issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine provided a closer look at the imaging sensors and the associated processing and control mechanisms in the Hubble and its successor.

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.