Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing

Speech-enabled systems often experience performance degradation in real-world scenarios, primarily due to adverse acoustic conditions and interactions among multiple speakers. Enhancing the front-end speech processing technology is vital for improving the performance of the back-end systems. 

Introducing ICASSP 2024 SPGC competition aiming at reconstructing skin spectral reflectance in the visible (VIS) and near-infrared (NIR) spectral range from RGB images captured by everyday cameras, offering a transformative approach for cosmetic and beauty applications. 

In the ICIP 2023 Grand Challenge entitled "Automatic Detection of Mosquito Breeding Grounds", we consider the development of a video-analysis system for the automatic detection of objects commonly associated with mosquito foci: discarded tires, water tanks, buckets, puddles, pools, and bottles.

The proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) such as drones has caused serious security and privacy concerns in the recent past. Detecting drones is extremely challenging in conditions where the drones exactly resemble a bird or any other flying entity and are to be detected under low visibility conditions.

This challenge will perform the first comprehensive benchmark of the impact of a wide range of distortions on the performance of current object detection methods. The proposed database contains, in addition to the conventional real distortions, other synthesized photo-realistic distortions corresponding to real and very frequent scenarios often neglected in other databases despite their importance. The synthetic distortions are generated according to several types and severity levels with respect to the scene context.

Point clouds (PC) are widely used for storing and transmitting 3D visual data in applications like virtual reality, autonomous driving, etc. To deal with the large size and complexity of point clouds, efficient compression methods have been developed, including MPEG standards and recent deep-learning-based approaches. To optimize and benchmark processing algorithms and codecs, point cloud quality metrics are crucial.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICIP 2022 Grand Challenge

KP Labs, together with ESA (European Space Agency) and partner QZ Solutions, has created an extraordinary challenge, as they will revolutionize the future of farming with the help of in-orbit processing. Maintaining farm sustainability through improving the agricultural management practices by the usage of recent advances in Earth observation and artificial intelligence has become an important issue nowadays. It can not only help farmers face the challenge of producing food at an affordable price, but can also be crucial step toward the planet-friendly agriculture.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICIP 2022 Grand Challenge

The perceptual quality of images/videos in the context of video surveillance has a very significant impact on high-level tasks such as object detection, identification of abnormal events, visual tracking, to name a few. Despite the development of advanced video sensors with higher resolution, the quality of the acquired video is often affected by some distortions due to the environment, encoding and storage technologies, which can only be avoided by employing of intelligent post-processing solutions.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICIP 2022 Grand Challenge

Intestinal parasitic infections remain among the leading causes of morbidity worldwide, especially in tropical and sub-tropical areas with more temperate climates. According to WHO, approximately 1.5 billion people, or 24% of the world’s population, are infected with soil-transmitted helminth infections (STH), and 836 million children worldwide required preventive chemotherapy for STH in 2020.

Associated SPS Event: IEEE ICIP 2022 Grand Challenge

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging provides the ability to capture, manipulate and display real-world lighting. This is a significant upgrade from Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) which only handles up to 255 luminance values concurrently. While capture technologies have advanced significantly over the last few years, currently available HDR capturing sensors (e.g., smartphones) only improve the dynamic range by a few stops over conventional SDR.