IEEE Signal Processing Society: Celebrating 75 Years of Remarkable Achievements (Part 2)

It is our great pleasure to introduce the second part of this special issue to you! The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) has completed 75 years of remarkable service to the signal processing community. The eight selected articles included in this second part are clear portraits of that. As the review process for these articles took longer, however, they could not be included in the first part of the special issue, and we are glad to bring them to you now.

In the first article, “Audio Signal Processing in the 21st Century,” Richard et al. [A1] provide an overview of the long history of research on audio and acoustics, including the analysis and modeling of room acoustics, generation of artificial reverberation, spatial rendering, echo cancellation, dereverberation, acoustic feedback control, source separation, music information retrieval, plus other related and relevant topics.

Next is the second article, “Twenty-five Years of Evolution in Speech and Language Processing,” by Yu et al. [A2], who describe major breakthroughs in each of the following speech processing subfields: language processing, automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech coding, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, language identification, language understanding, dialog systems, and deep learning. They also comment on the main driving forces that led to the current state of the art in the field. The societal impacts and potential future directions are complementarily discussed by them.

The third article in this special issue is “The Foundations of Computational Imaging,” where Fowler et al. [A3] present historical perspectives on the field of computational sensing and imaging, providing some context on how it has arrived at its present state as well as on its role within the SPS. Physics-driven imaging and explicit inverse operators, optimization formulation, and model-based reconstruction, in addition to data-driven models and machine learning for image processing, are among the main details discussed.