Welcome to the 40th ICASSP! This year, the world’s premier signal processing conference is being held at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre in Brisbane, the capital of sunny Queensland. The technical program of regular and special session papers, together with the tutorials and the School of ICASSP, is full of varied, interesting and stimulating ideas. We hope you will both benefit from and enjoy the conference.
This year, we received 2322 regular, 90 special session and an outstanding 90 SPL paper submissions. After a thorough and rigorous selection process, 1207 of the regular papers were accepted, resulting in an acceptance rate of 52%. To achieve this, a tremendous effort was put in by the Chairs of the numerous Technical Committees and Special Interest Groups of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Nearly every submitted paper received at least three reviews, yet the tight deadlines for the review cycle were met. Our thanks go to these Chairs: Tomohiro Nakatani (AASP), Michael Liebling (BISP), Warren J. Gross (DISPS), Pascal Frossard (IVMSP), Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu (IDSP), Gwenaël Doërr (IFS), Paris Smaragdis (MLSP), Dinei Florencio (MMSP), Dominic Ho (SAM), Doug Williams (ED), Tim Davidson (SPCOM), Sergios Theodoridis (SPTM), Douglas O’Shaughnessy (SL), Bhuvana Ramabhradran (HLT), Antonio Ortega (BigData) and Yen-Kuang Chen (IoT). We are also indebted to the members of the ICASSP 2015 Technical Program Committee, comprised of the TC Chairs, their delegates, and several other volunteers whose support took many forms. The TPC members are listed individually on a separate page of this Conference Guide. The success of this conference should be primarily attributed to the efforts of these volunteers, and our sincere thanks go out to them. Of course, each of the TC Chairs was supported by a host of reviewers who carried out the difficult task of reading and assessing the submitted papers. While too numerous to acknowledge individually, their efforts underpin the quality of the Technical Program.
Complementing the regular oral and poster sessions, twelve special sessions have been included. Special Session Chairs, Robert Calderbank, Stephen Howard and Songsri Sirianunpiboon selected a program of varied and stimulating topics from an impressive set of proposals. We hope these will be of high interest to our signal processing community and we would like to thank the Special Session Chairs, the individual organisers of each of the sessions and the authors of the contributed papers for their efforts.
Following the precedent of recent ICASSPs, this year the Technical Program includes presentation of papers published in the journal IEEE Signal Processing Letters. A record number of 90 such papers were submitted and all of them appear in the program. Prior to the start of the regular technical program on Tuesday, seventeen half-day tutorials will be held on Sunday and Monday. Daniel Palomar, the Tutorials Chair, has assembled a varied and stimulating set of tutorials, selected from the large number of high-quality tutorial proposals submitted. Some of the tutorials were oversubscribed well before the beginning of the conference – well done and thanks Daniel!
An innovative new element, the School of ICASSP, is being introduced in ICASSP 2015. This idea was conceived by our Conference Co-Chair, Vaughan Clarkson and its implementation has been spearheaded by Robby McKilliam and Gerald Matz. The School of ICASSP entails a series of one-hour instructional presentations on relatively recent topics of broad interest in Signal Processing. It is open to all ICASSP attendees and we hope it will provide some of you the chance to learn about a topic or two you’ve been meaning to read about but haven’t yet found the time. Several leading experts have volunteered as presenters for the School of ICASSP, and we wish to express our appreciation to them as well as the organisers.
Our technical program includes five exciting plenary talks:
We sincerely thank these prominent experts for agreeing to share their insights and experience with us on such a variety of topics.
The regular technical program starts on Tuesday, following the tutorials. It is organised into eleven different time slots during four days. Each time slot generally has five parallel oral sessions, eight parallel poster sessions, and one special session. The decisions on placement of papers into lecture or poster sessions were made to keep papers of similar and related technical contents in the same place. In the tradition of ICASSP, lecture and poster presentations are not distinguished by quality of the work presented.
At this 40th ICASSP, we will recognise students for their outstanding papers with the ICASSP 2015 Student Paper Award and the Starkey award. We are grateful to TC review coordinators for forwarding candidates to us and would like to particularly thank Nikos Sidiropoulos for his efforts in selecting winners for the Student Paper Award and to Patrick Taylor, Bhuvana Ramabhradran and Warren Gross for their efforts in selecting the winner of the Starkey award.
We would also like to express our utmost gratitude to Lance Cotton and Billene Mercer from Conference Management Services, whose prompt and professional assistance was invaluable in both putting together the technical program and ensuring that the submitted papers were dealt with quickly and efficiently.
Ultimately, the quality of the conference is determined by the efforts of the authors and speakers; our thanks go out to you for submitting your work and supporting this flagship conference, we appreciate your efforts and look forward to learning about your research.
Doug Gray and Doug Cochran
Technical Program Co-Chairs, ICASSP 2015