Welcome to ICASSP 2018, the world’s largest and most comprehensive conference on signal processing and its applications, held this year in the city of Calgary, Alberta. Calgary is the fourth-largest city in Canada and offers its warm western hospitality to all attendees. We are happy to welcome you to Calgary and hope you will enjoy the city and the outstanding technical program.
The theme of this year’s ICASSP conference is “Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence: Changing the World.” The conference theme is reflected in much of the technical program including the special sessions, plenary talks, innovation forum, and tutorials. The exciting developments in the synergy between signal processing and artificial intelligence helped to produce a very successful technical program.
This year, we received 2830 paper submissions, the second largest number of submissions for any ICASSP conference. The review process was undertaken by the Technical Committees (TCs) and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. After a careful and thorough review, in which almost all papers were reviewed by three or more reviewers, a total of 1406 papers have been accepted resulting in an acceptance rate of 49.7%. The program features 110 poster sessions and 77 lecture sessions, including 16 special sessions. We would like to thank the Special Sessions Chair, Tulay Adali, and Special Sessions Co-Chair, Seungjin Choi, for presenting a very exciting special session program that was selected from a competitive list of 42 special session proposal submissions, among the largest number of special session proposals in past ICASSP conferences.
As in previous years, the technical program also includes demos presented in 4 demo sessions as well as 36 papers published in the IEEE Signal Processing Letters within the past year that will be presented at the conference in sessions according to their topics. The distribution of the total number of papers submitted to each TC/SIG as well as to other relevant categories is given in the table below.
| Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) | 310 |
| Bio Imaging and Signal Processing (BISP) | 138 |
| Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems (DISPS) | 43 |
| Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) | 321 |
| Information Forensics and Security (IFS) | 83 |
| Industry DSP Technology (IDSP) | 21 |
| Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) | 368 |
| Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) | 63 |
| Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing (SAM) | 147 |
| Signal Processing for Communications and Networking (SPCOM) | 171 |
| Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) | 331 |
| Speech Processing (SP) | 529 |
| Human Language Technology (HLT) | 107 |
| Signal Processing for Big Data (BD) | 45 |
| Signal Processing for Internet of Things (IOT) | 24 |
| Signal Processing (SP) Education (SPED) | 6 |
| Computational Imaging (CIM) | 31 |
| Special Sessions (SS) | 92 |
| Demonstrations (DEMO) | 13 |
| Signal Processing Letters (SPL) | 37 |
ICASSP 2018 will feature 14 outstanding tutorials that cover a wide range of topics of growing interest that were organized by Tutorial Sessions Chair, Homer Chen, and Tutorial Sessions Co-Chair, Chungyong Lee. We are also looking forward to four exciting plenary talks organized by Plenary Sessions Chair, Henrique Malvar, and Plenary Sessions Co-Chair, Changick Kim:
The “Innovation Forum on Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities,” organized by Innovative Programs Chair, John Apostolopoulus, will present distinguished panelists addressing topics focused on the conference theme. The technical program will also feature a technical panel discussion on “An Industry Perspective on Emerging Signal Processing Challenge,” organized by Yonina Eldar and Martin Haardt. In addition, an “NSF Panel Discussion” as well as a panel that addresses “What Is Needed to Become an IEEE Fellow – Theory vs. Practice” will be presented. Furthermore, a “MathWorks” workshop as well as an “Author Ethics and IEEE New Author Tools” workshop will be held during the conference. Finally, MathWorks has sponsored the “IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2018: Forensic Camera Model Identification Challenge.” We hope that the technical program will offer something new and exciting to all the attendees and lead to open and active exchange of information.
A major effort in formation of the technical program is managing the review of all submitted papers to ensure a high-quality conference. We would therefore like to extend our deepest gratitude to all the TC and SIG Chairs, review coordinators, and special session organizers, who worked very hard to ensure the success of the technical program. We would also like to thank the many reviewers whose diligent reviews made this difficult process possible. We further thank our plenary, technical panel, and tutorial speakers for their presentations. The quality of the conference is ultimately determined by the efforts of the authors and speakers, whom we value greatly and look forward to learn about their innovative research during the conference. Finally, we acknowledge the great support from Conference Management Services, and from Lance Cotton in particular, who has been with us every step of the way, providing professional, precise, and very competent support at every stage.
We look forward to welcoming you to ICASSP 2018 and to Calgary.
Hope you enjoy the conference!
Dan Schonfeld
Technical Program Chair, ICASSP 2018
Nam Ik Cho and Pascale Fung
Technical Program Co-Chairs, ICASSP 2018