Welcome to spectacular Vancouver for the 38th edition of ICASSP, the premier conference in Signal Processing to be held at the Vancouver Convention Center in British Columbia, Canada. This year, we received 3314 regular paper submissions (not including special session papers). Submission figures are listed below with topics represented by a Technical Committee (TC) of Signal Processing Society:
| Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) | 350 |
| Bio Imaging and Signal Processing (BISP) | 164 |
| Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems (DISPS) | 99 |
| Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) | 475 |
| Industry Technology Track (ITT) | 33 |
| Information Forensics and Security (IFS) | 93 |
| Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) | 195 |
| Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) | 74 |
| Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing (SAM) | 216 |
| Signal Processing Education (SPED) | 6 |
| Signal Processing for Communications and Networking (SPCOM) | 382 |
| Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) | 473 |
| Speech Processing (SP) | 609 |
| Spoken Language Processing (SLP) | 145 |
| Special Sessions | 47 |
A tremendous effort has been put into a thorough review of all submitted papers to ensure a high quality conference. Special thanks go to the Technical Committee Chairs for organizing several hundred reviewers: Shoji Makino (AASP), Dimitri Van De Ville (BISP), Michael Liebling (BISP), Jarmo Takala (DISPS), Warren J. Gross (DISPS), James Fowler (IVMSP), Pascal Frossard (IVMSP), Bearice Pesquet-Popescu (ITT), Min Wu (IFS), Paris Smaragdis (MLSP), Oscar Au (MMSP), Dinei Florencio (MMSP), Dominic Ho (SAM), Peter Willett (SAM), Roxana Saint-Nom (SPED), Tim Davidson (SPCOM), Zhi-Quan Luo (SPCOM), Sergios Theodoridis (SPTM), V. John Mathews (SPTM), John Hansen (SP/SLP), and Douglas O'Shaughnessy (SP/SLP).
This year's ICASSP set an acceptance rate at 52% in order to ensure its quality as a flagship conference. After some adjustments among TCs, a total of 1786 including special session papers were finally accepted. We worked closely with the TC review coordinators and greatly appreciate their full cooperation and timely responses to all of our requests. They managed to obtain three reviews for most papers and sometimes even more for critical cases. The success of this conference should be primarily attributed to their efforts along with detailed reviews.
As a complement to the regular papers in the technical program, eight special sessions have been included. Special Session Chair, Xiaodong He has put together a program with emerging signal processing topics of high interest to the community. We would like to thank the individual organizers of the sessions and the authors of the contributed papers. Also this year, for the first time,s ICASSP will include papers presentation of papers published in the journal Signal Processing Letters.
Prior to the start of the regular technical program, fifteen half day tutorials will be held on Sunday and Monday. Khaled El-Maleh is the Tutorial Chair.
We are pleased to announce five exciting plenary talks for the ICASSP 2013:
After tutorial programs on Sunday and Monday, the regular technical program starts on Tuesday. It is organized into eleven different time slots during four days. Each time slot has four or five parallel oral sessions, eight parallel poster sessions, and one or two special sessions. The decision on whether a paper goes into a lecture or poster session was made to keep papers of similar and related technical contents in the same place. At ICASSP, neither of lecture sessions, nor poster sessions is considered to be more prestigious than the other - high quality papers will be found in both venues.
At this 38th ICASSP, we will recognize two students for their outstanding papers in quality with ICASSP 2013 Student Paper Award in a range of signal processing topics. We are grateful to TC review coordinators for forwarding candidates to us.
We wish to thank all TC review coordinators for helping us create an attractive and exciting program for this year's conference. Ultimately, the quality of the conference is determined by the efforts of the authors and speakers; we appreciate their participation and look forward to learning about their research. Finally, we express our utmost gratitude to Lance Cotton and Billene Mercer from Conference Management Services, whose prompt and professional assistance was invaluable in putting together the technical program.
Vikram Krishnamurthy and Kostas Plataniotis
Technical Program Chairs, ICASSP 2013