IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

Visualizing information inside objects is an everlasting need to bridge the world from physics, chemistry, and biology to computation. Among all tomographic techniques, terahertz (THz) computational imaging has demonstrated its unique sensing features to digitalize multidimensional object information in a nondestructive, nonionizing, and noninvasive way.

Electromagnetic (EM) imaging is widely applied in sensing for security, biomedicine, geophysics, and various industries. It is an ill-posed inverse problem whose solution is usually computationally expensive. Machine learning (ML) techniques and especially deep learning (DL) show potential in fast and accurate imaging. However, the high performance of purely data-driven approaches relies on constructing a training set that is statistically consistent with practical scenarios, which is often not possible in EM-imaging tasks. Consequently, generalizability becomes a major concern.

Thanks to the tremendous interest from the research community, the focus of the March issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine is on the second volume of the special issue on physics-driven machine learning for computational imaging, which brings together nine articles of the 19 accepted papers from the original 47 submissions.

First, I would like to wish you and your loved ones a nice new year filled with health and happiness. The last few years have been challenging for various reasons: the COVID-19 pandemic, climatic events, and the war in Ukraine, to name a few. It seems impossible to be able to stop the megalomania and madness of some human beings.

Recent years have witnessed a rapidly growing interest in next-generation imaging systems and their combination with machine learning. While model-based imaging schemes that incorporate physics-based forward models, noise models, and image priors laid the foundation in the emerging field of computational sensing and imaging, recent advances in machine learning, from large-scale optimization to building deep neural networks, are increasingly being applied in modern computational imaging.

The compressive sensing (CS) scheme exploits many fewer measurements than suggested by the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem to accurately reconstruct images, which has attracted considerable attention in the computational imaging community. While classic image CS schemes employ sparsity using analytical transforms or bases, the learning-based approaches have become increasingly popular in recent years. Such methods can effectively model the structure of image patches by optimizing their sparse representations or learning deep neural networks while preserving the known or modeled sensing process. 

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Radio maps characterize quantities of interest in radio communication environments, such as the received signal strength and channel attenuation, at every point of a geographical region. Radio map estimation (RME) typically entails interpolative inference based on spatially distributed measurements. In this tutorial article, after presenting some representative applications of radio maps, the most prominent RME methods are discussed.

Sparse modeling for signal processing and machine learning, in general, has been at the focus of scientific research for over two decades. Among others, supervised sparsity-aware learning (SAL) consists of two major paths paved by 1) discriminative methods that establish direct input–output mapping based on a regularized cost function optimization and 2) generative methods that learn the underlying distributions.

Word art, which is text rendered with properly designed appealing artistic effects, has been a popular form of art throughout human history. Artistic text effects are of great aesthetic value and symbolic significance. Decorating with appropriate effects not only makes text more attractive but also significantly enhances the atmosphere of a scene. Thus, artistic text effects are widely used in publicity and advertising.