About SPM e-Newsletter

Since April 2007, the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine has introduced a new form of publication - a Monthly Electronic Newsletter. The e-Newsletter will complement the bi-monthly Magazine to serve the members in the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS).  Through email notification and expanded coverage on its website, the e-Newsletter will provide members with timely updates on:

• society and technical committee news,

• conference and publication opportunities, new books, and Ph.D. theses,

• signal processing related research opportunities, and

• activities in industry consortiums, local chapters, and government programs.

The e-Newsletter is a gateway to reach out to signal processing professionals around the world.  We invite you to contribute and share your news with tens of thousands of SPS members through this monthly electronic publication with fast turn-around cycle. IEEE members may manage their subscription of the email notification of the eNews and related SPS announcements at this page.  Please bookmark <http://enews.ieee-spm.org> for current and archived issues of eNews.

Submission Instructions  - Contribution for the June '07 Issue Due May 20, 2007

Please contact the Associate Editors of the corresponding sections as listed below to provide your input or if you have questions. Make sure that you include your name, affiliation, and email and phone contact information. Contributions submitted by May 20, 2007 will be considered for inclusion in the next issue of the SPM e-Newsletter.  

Contact Information of the SPM e-Newsletter Team

  Min Wu, SPM Area Editor for e-Newsletter, University of Maryland, College Park, USA (minwu AT umd.edu)

  Huaiyu Dai, Associate Editor, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA (huaiyu_dai AT ncsu.edu)
     Conference and publication news

  Alessandro Piva, Associate Editor, University of Florence, Italy (piva AT lci.det.unifi.it)
     News and activities in local chapters and research groups (including new Ph.D. theses)

  Mihaela van der Schaar, Associate Editor, University of California, Los Angeles, USA (mihaela AT ee.ucla.edu)

     News and activities of SPS Technical Committees, industry consortiums and international standards

  Nitin Chandrachoodan, Digital Production Editor, Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (nitin AT ee.iitm.ac.in)
     Online submission and production system

  Shih-Fu Chang, SPM Editor-in-Chief, Columbia University, New York, USA (sfchang AT ee.columbia.edu)

  * Please replace "AT" in the email addresses with @.

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In-Depth Articles of May 2007 SPM eNews

The 32nd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) was held in Honolulu, Hawaii, on April 15-20, 2007 [http://www.icassp2007.org/]. ICASSP is the world’s largest and comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. This year is the first time in ICASSP's three decade history that it was held in Hawaii, the heart of the Pacific Rim. Over 1800 attendees from 42 countries came to Honolulu, Oahu, known traditionally as the "Gathering Place" in Hawaii, to attend ICASSP.

A total of 2912 papers were submitted to ICASSP 2007, out of which 1344 papers were accepted for presentation, including 72 papers in 12 special sessions. The conference offered a broad spectrum of choices for the attendees, including a number of world-class speakers, 72 lecture sessions, 96 poster sessions, 2 special panel discussions, 15 tutorials, 3 hands-on workshops, and 11 exhibitors.

The opening awards ceremony honored the winners of 2006 major SPS awards and newly elected 2007 IEEE Fellows who are SPS members. Winners and finalists of the Student Paper Award Contest were recognized in the ICASSP welcome reception. A total of 54 student finalists were nominated by various technical committees, and each finalist made a 10-minute oral presentation to one of three judging panels, followed by 5 minutes of questions and answers. One first prize, two second prizes, three third prizes, and four honorable mentions were chosen, based on quality of oral presentation (including technical competency and ability to answer questions), quality of technical contents, and significance of the results and potential impact.

The conference venue was the Hawai‘i Convention Center, which was ranked as North America’s most attractive convention center and winner of numerous awards. Recognized as a “living work of art,” the Center’s design captures the essence of the Hawaiian environment. Its soaring, glass-front entry – with a 70 foot misting waterfall and mature palm trees – embraces guests with aloha. The facility houses a $2 million Hawaiian art collection of unique pieces and features a rooftop tropical garden of native flora.

The coffee breaks and welcome reception featured a special Hawaiian touch and fusion of the East and the West. Throughout the conference, attendees enjoyed a broad selection of high-quality hors d'oeuvres, celebrated Kona coffee drinks, and exotic fruits and fresh juices.

The conference banquet was held at the historic Royal Hawaiian Hotel. The hotel, which is also known as the Pink Palace of the Pacific due to its distinctive color, is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places. It is one of the first hotels built in Waikīkī, having opened in 1927, and served as the Western White House during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. After receiving a lei greeting, the attendees enjoyed an hour-long cocktail reception, featuring arts and crafts demonstrations from seven Polynesian islands (Samoa, Aotearoa, Fiji, Hawaii, Marquesas, Tahiti, and Tonga). At the sound of the Conch Shell, the traditional luau banquet began at the ocean front lawn, serving a wide variety of foods including traditional Hawai‘ian cuisine. Following the feast, the Polynesian Cultural Center provided dance and music performances, showcasing the unique culture and spirit of various Island Nations of Polynesia. The exciting fire knife dancers, followed by the beloved Island farewell song “Aloha Oe” written by Queen Liliuokalani, brought an unforgettable ending to the ICASSP Luau Night.

The ICASSP 2007 Organizing Committee:
(from left to right) Todd Reed, General Co-Chair; Phil Chou, Special Session/Panel Chair;
Hideaki Sakai, Tutorial Chair; Yih-Fang Huang, Technical Co-Chair; Zixiang Xiong, Publication Chair;
Anthony Kuh, Technical Co-Chair; Min Wu, Finance Chair; K.J. Ray Liu, General Co-Chair;
Billene Mercer, Registration and Conference Management; Kiyoharu Aizawa, Publicity Chair.

Return to Conference News

Exclusive TC Report from Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee Contributors:  Ingemar Cox, MMSP Chair                    Anthony Vetro, MMSP Chair-elect

The IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) Technical Committee promotes the advancement of multimedia signal processing technology with special emphasis on the interaction, coordination, synchronization, and joint processing of multimodal signals. The MMSP-TC serves the technical membership of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in a number of ways, including organization of conferences and workshops, award nominations, and supporting related journals.

One of the most important activities of this TC is to organize the MMSP workshop, which as been held annually since 1997, except for 2003, and has enjoyed great success and reputation. This single track workshop provides an intimate forum for researchers and practitioners working in the field to present new ideas and interact with one another. Recent editions of the workshop have included overview talks in specific area of interest, in addition to high-quality keynotes and panel discussions featuring well known experts in the field. Typical acceptance rates for oral presentations in this workshop have been less than 20%. The next MMSP workshop will be held October 1-3, 2007 in Chania, Crete with the theme Multimedia Interaction and Communication. Please see http://www.mmsp2007.org/ for further details on the technical and social program.

TC members are also actively involved in the paper reviews of ICASSP and ICME, and often assume leadership roles as part of the organizing committee for these larger conferences. The most related journals to the MMSP technical committee include the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY.

Generally speaking, MMSP is a field that emphasizes applications. Many core research issues, such as video indexing, multimedia streaming, multimedia security, and multi-modal human computer interface, are motivated by real world applications. In addition, MMSP technical areas have been the main foci of international multimedia standards such as MPEG-7 and MPEG-21.

The MMSP-TC is currently composed of 30 elected members. For more details about the activities and events of interest related to this TC, please visit the TC website [http://mmsptc.adastral.ucl.ac.uk/].

Return to TC News

Standardization Efforts for Mobile TV Services

Contributor:  Thomas Stockhammer (Nomor Research) and Mark Watson (Digital Fountain)

Mobile TV targets bringing TV-like services to mobile phones. However, mobile phones nowadays differ significantly from traditional TV equipments, for example, they integrate two-way communication network connections and flexible operating systems as well as powerful hardware platforms allowing smart software applications. This provides the possibility that mobile TV users can enjoy personalized and interactive TV with content specifically adapted to the mobile medium. In addition to traditional live TV channels, mobile TV delivers a variety of services including video-on-demand and Mobile TV pod casts, where content is delivered to a user’s mobile on-demand or by subscriptions.

From a delivery perspective there are currently two different approaches of delivering mobile TV services. A point of note is that more than 90% of commercially deployed Mobile TV services nowadays run over two-way cellular network such as UMTS, CDMA2000, WiMAX, or extensions of those. However, more recently, unidirectional broadcast technologies such as DVB-H, DMB/DAB and MediaFLO are attracting significant attention. Furthermore, two-way cellular networks are currently being extended with IP multicast transport, e.g. with 3GPP MBMS or 3GPP2 BCMCS, which will provide the possibility to distribute IP multicast data over point-to-multipoint radio bearers, increasing efficiency and so delivering more services.

While first deployments provide good user experience, standardization bodies continue to work on improvements and extensions of existing solutions to provide richer services, better efficiency, increased coverage and improved scalability (support of many users in parallel).

Among others, the following bodies address the standardization of Mobile TV services:

• 3GPP introduced its Mobile Broadcast/Multicast Services (MBMS) in Release 6 which allows streaming video services as well as download/podcast services over IP multicast transport utilizing point-to-multipoint transmission on the UMTS (and also GSM) air interface. For reliability within the download and streaming services, MBMS makes use of advanced application layer packet forward error correction by applying Raptor codes. This approach significantly improves performance over fading mobile radio channels due to the effective time diversity of several seconds or minutes.

• In addition, recent advances in 3GPP’s packet-switched streaming services allow faster channel switching, support of H.264/AVC, and other optimizations.

• In ongoing work, 3GPP is working on the extension of MBMS and Mobile TV services to advanced packet-switched transmission modes such as High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) and Long-Term Evolution (LTE). Work on “Dynamic and Interactive Multimedia Scenes” (DIMS) will allow broader support of rich multimedia services and interactivity.

• 3GPP2 has taken similar actions and also introduces and IP multicast mode with appropriate services within the BroadCast/MultiCast Service (BCMCS).

• The DVB Project has recently completed specifications for IP Datacast (IPDC) over DVB-H, which includes protocols for streaming and download delivery similar to MBMS, again including forward error correction with Raptor codes, as well as Service Protection and Electronic Service Guide capabilities. The DVB Project is currently working on enhancements of the systems with respect to improved channel switching times. Other enhancements will be provided by DVB-SH (Satellite to Handhelds), which extends the coverage of DVB-H like services, especially in rural areas, by adding satellite reception.

• Inspired by the DVB-H success, ATSC has recently issues a call for technology for mobile TV services.

Many other standardization bodies and forums, such as MediaFLO, DAB/DMB, WiMAX, and OMA, have similar work items on their roadmap. Despite first deployments of Mobile TV already provide promising quality, it is expected that the experience of these first deployments and recent and future advances in research will inspire new and improved systems with innovative service offerings. Whilst first deployments have focused on traditional TV “channels”, attention is now also turning to more targeted services, such as “clipcasting”, “TV podcasting” and on-demand content. Advances can be expected in many different areas of signal processing and communications, for example in media coding, content delivery protocols, application layer reliability, radio access technologies, digital rights managements and conditional access. Current standards represent only the beginning of the mobile broadcast story, with an exciting future to come.
 

Return to Standardization News

Turning the Page on Digital Rights Management

Contributor:  Ton Kalker (HP Lab, Palo Alto, CA)

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies have been, still are and, in all likelihood, will be a heavily debated topic among all parties in the content value chain, from creation, through aggregation and distribution, to consumption. These DRM technologies enable content owners (think movie studios and record labels) to control the way in which (mostly) professional content is being distributed and consumed. An additional claimed advantage of applying DRM technologies is, in content owner speak, the ability to create new business models, such as Napster-like subscription models. A good overview of the history and state-of-the-art of DRM can be found at this link.

From an end-user point of view, DRM technologies have not wholeheartedly been embraced. An often heard argument states that DRM technologies restrict the fair use of content, i.e. the ability to enjoy content whenever, wherever and on whatever (sufficiently capable) platform. The fact that iTunes content is only playable on 5 PCs and that iTunes content will not play on non-Apple portables is, among others, put forward as evidence that DRM is evil.

However, we should realize that DRM technology is only in part to blame for the perceived bad user experience and that DRM technologies constitute only a small fraction of the tools used in the global War on Piracy (WoP). Other elements in the global WoP are anti-circumvention & copyright law and the security infra-structure in new main-stream operating systems. With respect to the former, prime examples are given by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which considerably restricts the legal options for reverse-engineering of copy(right) protection technologies, and the proposed "Digital Broadcast Television Redistribution Control" provision that would strictly enforce copyright compliance rules on HDTV demodulators. With respect to the latter, we observe that the new Microsoft Vista operating system is built upon a secure kernel that provides for a secure path from media source to media sink. However, some argue that as a consequence of this security framework the overall system reliability may suffer.

The political and business aspects of the WoP are not appropriate to be addressed solely by us as a technical community. However, we may attempt to build better technical solutions that will allow for a better user experience. In particular, we may try to overcome the problems associated with the presence of a multiplicity of incompatible DRM systems, of which Microsoft DRM, iTunes FairPlay and OMA DRM 2.0 are just a few examples. More concretely, we may try to build technical solutions that will allow users to enjoy their content on any sufficiently capable platform, freeing the user from being locked into a single eco-system, and for example allowing them to enjoy purchased content as easily on an Apple platform as well as on a Microsoft platform. One of the most relevant efforts in this respect is provided by the Coral Consortium.

The Coral Consortium is a large cross-industry group that aims to provide a standardized DRM-data exchange protocol that will enable collaborating services and devices to seamlessly move content and associated meta-data around in appropriately defined eco-systems. This protocol is being defined in such a way that it has minimal impact on existing DRM solutions, allowing easy adoption by any service provider willing to interoperate with others. At the same time, the Coral Consortium is also working on defining a business template for an interoperable eco-system centered around the concept of a provider-independent authorized-domain. This template also provides guidelines for compliance and robustness rules, trust anchors and usage rules.

The hope is that Coral will turn the page on DRM and take away some of the user frustration associated with DRM technology, enabling an environment where end-users have more freedom in using content, where content owners will feel comfortable in that their assets are protected and where DRM providers will still be able to compete. If Coral or similar efforts such as the Digital Media Project fail, the future of digital content and content distribution will remain uncertain. DRM will not simply disappear, despite some signs to the opposite. The call for interoperability is strong and will be hard to ignore.
 

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IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 2007 - Hosted by the Digital Video and Multimedia Lab at Columbia University
SPM e-Newsletter Hosted by the Communications and Signal Processing Labs at University of Maryland