About the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter

Since April 2007, the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine has introduced a new form of publication - the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter.  This monthly electronic 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 Inside Signal Processing 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 E-Newsletter and related SPS announcements at this page.  Please bookmark <http://enews.ieee-spm.org> for current and archived issues of the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter.

Submission Instructions  - Contribution for the April '08 Issue Due March 20, 2008

Visit the web submission site to provide your input. Make sure that you include your name, affiliation, and email and phone contact information. Contributions submitted by March 20, 2008 will be considered for inclusion in the next issue of the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter. Please contact the Associate Editors of the corresponding sections as listed below if you have questions. Your comments and suggestions on the new submission system are welcome.

Contact Information of the 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 (including new books)

  Pascal Frossard, Associate Editor, EPFL, Switzerland (pascal.frossard AT epfl.ch)
     News and activities of SPS Technical Committees, industry consortiums and international standards

  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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2008:  January-February'08  

2007:  December'07  November'07  October'07  August-September'07  July'07  June'07  May'07  April'07
 

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In-Depth E-News Articles

BEST PAPER AWARDS

Ashish Aggarwal, Shankar L. Regunathan and Kenneth Rose, for the paper entitled, "Efficient Bit-Rate Scalability for Weighted Squared Error Optimization in Audio Coding," published in the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Volume 14, Number 4, July 2006.

Holger Boche and Martin Schubert, for the paper entitled, "Resource Allocation in Multiantenna Systems – Achieving Max-Min Fairness by Optimizing a Sum of Inverse SIR," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 54, Number 6, Part I, June 2006.

Goran Dimić and Nicholas D. Sidiropoulos for the paper entitled, "On Downlink Beamforming With Greedy User Selection: Performance Analysis and a Simple New Algorithm," published in the Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 53, Number 10, October 2005.

Jan Eriksson and Visa Koivunen, for the paper entitled, "Identifiability, Separability, and Uniqueness of Linear ICA Models," published in the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Volume 11, Number 7, July 2004.

Onur G. Guleryuz for the paper entitled, "Nonlinear Approximation Based Image Recovery Using Adaptive Sparse Reconstructions and Iterated Denoising – Part I: Theory, and Part II: Adaptive Algorithms," published in the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 15, Number 3, March 2006.

Hong-Kwang Jeff Kuo and Yuqing Gao for the paper entitled, "Maximum Entropy Direct Models for Speech Recognition," published in the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Volume 14, Number 3, May 2006.

YOUNG AUTHOR BEST PAPER AWARDS

Jing Liu, for the paper co-authored with Jian-Kang Zhang and Kon Max Wong entitled, "On the Design of Minimum BER Linear Space-Time Block Codes for MIMO Systems Equipped with MMSE Receivers," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 54, Number 8, August 2006.

XuanLong Nguyen, for the paper co-authored with Martin J. Wainwright and Michael I. Jordan entitled, "Nonparametric Decentralized Detection Using Kernel Methods," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 53, Number 11, November 2005.

Ana Petrovic and Oscar Divorra Escoda, for the paper co-authored with Pierre Vandergheynst entitled, "Multiresolution Segmentation of Natural Images: From Linear to Nonlinear Scale-Space Representations," published in the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 13, Number 8, August 2004.

Ami Wiesel, for the paper co-authored with Yonina C. Eldar and Shlomo Shamai (Shitz) entitled, "Linear Precoding via Conic Optimization for Fixed MIMO Receivers," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 54, Number 1, January 2006.

Qiyue Zou, for the paper co-authored with Zhiping Lin and Raimund J. Ober entitled, "The Cramer-Rao Lower Bound for Bilinear Systems," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 54, Number 5, May 2006.
 

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Exclusive Activity Report from SPS Santa Clara Valley Chapter by Douglas S. Chan (Chapter Secretary) and Tokunbo Ogunfunmi (Chapter Chair)

The IEEE Signal Processing Society Santa Clara Valley (SCV) chapter is situated in the high-tech center of Silicon Valley as part of IEEE Region 6. It provides a venue for its members to interact and learn the state-of-the-art in signal processing (SP).

The IEEE SPS Santa Clara Valley chapter offers monthly seminars to stimulate interests of its members. The large number of SP professionals in industry and academia in the region has made it possible for the Chapter to find guest speakers who are at the forefront of SP research or at the cutting edge of industry development. The proximity to high-tech firms and highly ranked universities also helps the SCV Chapter to attract prominent speakers around the world because of their frequent visits here. The topics and speakers of the seminars hosted or co-hosted since last year include:

• Mar 21, 2007: “A Simulation Model for IEEE 802.11n,” by Thomas Paul, Santa Clara University. .

• May 21, 2007: “Tesla Roadster: Embedded microprocessors and Design trade-offs,” by Doug Bourn, Tesla Motors, Inc.

• Sep 10, 2007: “Overview of WiMax Technology and Evolution,” by Hassan Yaghoobi, Intel Corp.

• Sep 17, 2007: “Transceiver Designs for Multicarrier Transmission,” by Yuan-Pei Lin, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan (Circuits & Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer, co-hosted with the Circuits & Systems and Communications Societies).

• Oct 8, 2007: “Overview of Multimedia Signal Processing on Multi-Core Processors,” by Yen-Kuang Chen, Intel Corp.

• Nov 12, 2007: “Efficient Techniques for MPEG-2 to H.264 Video Transcoding,” by Jun Xin, Xilient, Inc.

• Dec 10, 2007: “Re-Live the Movie The Matrix: From Harry Nyquist to Image-Based Rendering,” by Tsuhan Chen, Carnegie Mellon University (SPS Distinguished Lecturer).

• Jan 7, 2008: “An Open Baseband Processing Architecture for Future Mobile Terminal Design,” by Willie W. Lu, U.S. Center for Wireless Communications.

• Feb 11, 2008: “Simplified Fast Motion Estimation: Simplified and Unified Multi-Hexagon Search with Context Adaptive Lagrange Multiplier,” by Nam Ling, Santa Clara University (co-hosted with the Circuits & Systems Society Distinguished Lecture).

Among the many valued invited speakers are several IEEE Distinguished Lecturers. For example, in the past two quarters, the Chapter hosted two Distinguished Lecturers in the multimedia area in accordance with the chapter’s current focus in this area. In the most recent seminar on February 11, 2008, Prof. Nam Ling presented several motion estimation algorithms from his research team, some of which have been adopted into the reference software of international standards such as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. On December 10, 2007, Prof. Tsuhan Chen presented his latest research in multiview imaging. This SP tool, which is used for creating informative visualization and 3D analysis, lends itself to applications ranging from object tracking to special effects (such as the groundbreaking scenes in the movie “The Matrix”).

The seminars also featured speakers from industry. For example, in the area of multimedia, last year we had Dr. Yen-Kuang Chen speaking on the multimedia SP on multi-core processors. In order to fully explore the potential of many-core CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs, researchers and application developers must think about parallelism creatively. The talk discussed related challenges in multimedia SP application developments.

The two co-sponsored Distinguished Lectures described above also highlight the many successes achieved by co-sponsoring activities with chapters of our sister societies on topics of common interests. These occasions have enabled the SPS chapter to bring more distinguished speakers to the members and present to them a broader spectrum of SP and related topics. In addition, these joint events also offer effective opportunities for members of various societies to network and exchange ideas.

Along with the multimedia focus mentioned above, it is planned to steer the SPS chapter to new emerging areas in SP such as biometrics and genomics, hosting workshops and seminar series by researchers in these areas to cultivate a higher awareness of these topics to our members.

The Chapter’s 2007-2008 Executive Committee officers are: Chair – Prof. Tokunbo Ogunfunmi (Santa Clara University); Vice Chair – Xiaoshu Qian (Intel); Secretary – Douglas Chan (Cisco Systems); Treasurer – Vlad Potanin (National Semiconductor); and Program Coordinator – Yen-Kuang Chen (Intel). Please visit the chapter's website if you are interested in finding out more about or participating in SCV chapter’s current and future activities. SCV's upcoming seminar is also listed in the Chapter News section of this E-Newsletter.

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Latest Trends and Standards Update on Adoptions and Applications of H.264 Video Coding Standards Contributor:  Dr. Alexis Tourapis  (Dolby Laboratories)

Almost five years have gone by since the first official approval of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC as an international video coding standard from ISO/IEC and ITU-T. Since then, even though originally there were some serious, and some not as serious, concerns about the potential success of this standard in a space full of competing technologies such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 SP/ASP, H.263, On-2’s VP-6 and VP-7, and Microsoft’s VC-1 among others, H.264 has been adopted in a variety of applications and systems, essentially displacing most of its competition. This has been a direct outcome of the standard’s wide industry support, improved licensing conditions, and, most importantly, improved coding efficiency and support of new tools that make it attractive for both consumer and professional level applications.

H.264 was originally approved in May 2003 after more than five years of standardization activities, first under the auspices of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and later on jointly with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). This initial release was intended primarily for consumer level applications, such as video-conferencing, mobile TV, streaming, digital storage, and broadcasting. The standard received its first major makeover two years later with the addition of the Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt) which, among others, enabled higher quality video coding by supporting increased sample bit depth precision and higher-resolution color information. This enabled the standard to better target high end professional applications including video editing and post-production, and the digital still and video camera market. Another major addition to the standard was introduced more recently, in November 2007, containing the amendment for Scalable Video Coding (SVC) which, as the name suggests, extends the standard to better support scalable applications at various levels.

As suggested earlier, H.264 has already been adopted by a variety of applications including the Blu-Ray and the soon to be defunct HD-DVD next-generation optical video disk formats, broadcasting (i.e., DVB in Europe, DMB in the Republic of Korea, ISDB-T in Japan, among others) and satellite (i.e., BBC and Sky HD in the UK, DirecTV and Dish Networks in the US, etc.) systems throughout the world, IPTV, mobile multimedia and streaming services, and video conferencing. The standard is also already in use in several high end consumer cameras based on the AVCHD recording format, while there is also some lesser interest in the use of the standard for digital cinema applications. However, H.264 probably gained more popularity due to its integration in popular emerging devices by Apple Inc. such as the iPod/iPod-Touch personal media players, the iPhone, and the Apple TV. A more detailed list of currently deployed H.264 applications can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Applications.

As early numbers suggest, H.264 seems to be the current winner in the space of video coding technologies. As the standard matures and the encoding algorithms improve, so will also its popularity. The big question that remains though is what follows next. Would a new, higher efficiency codec emerge or is there higher interest and value in pursuing a codec that provides new functionalities and possibly a different experience, including the support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging and 3-D? Only time will tell.

To Explore More: Interested readers may read more about H.264 from a "Standards in a Nutshell" article (SPM, March 2007) and the associated online resource page.  Dr. Alexis Michael Tourapis is currently a Senior Staff Engineer with Dolby Laboratories Inc. where he is managing a team working on advanced video coding and processing technologies. He can be reached at [alexis.tourapis AT dolby.com].

 

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IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 2008 - Hosted by the Digital Video and Multimedia Lab at Columbia University
Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter Hosted by the Communications and Signal Processing Labs at University of Maryland