Signal Processing - January 2017 - 28

FigUre 14. Thomas Rösner (far left) and Stefan Diebenbusch (far right) from Rohde & Schwarz stand with team Shannon's Hounds members: (from left)
Lisa Hesse, Patricia Binder, Mark Balthasar, Fabio Nikolay, and Cevin Sehrt at the ceremony in Munich, 2012. (Photo courtesy of Rohde & Schwarz.)

the team representing TU Darmstadt. Shannons's Hounds performed outstandingly well and won the competition against
ten teams from Germany and Singapore. Each team member
received an Apple iPad and EUR€2,000 for the university. The
team decided that the prize money would be spent on hands-on
experiments for teaching purposes. Two out of the five members of the team are now RAs with the SPG, and one is with the
Communications Engineering Group.

The IEEE Signal Processing Cup
The IEEE Signal Processing Cup was initiated in 2013 by
the IEEE Signal Processing Society to increase students'
interest in signal processing and to raise their awareness of its
applications in real life [14]. Undergraduate students are provided with an opportunity to form teams and work together
to solve a challenging and interesting real-world problem
using signal processing techniques and methods. In 2014,
approximately 100 undergraduate students from all over the
world took part in 25 different teams. The theme for the first
competition was "Image Restoration/Super-Resolution for
Single Particle Analysis."
After the release of the new competition theme for 2015,
the SPG decided to take part in the second edition of this prestigious competition with its student team, Signal Processing
Crew Darmstadt. The task of the competition was to estimate
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the heart rate using PPG signals recorded from subjects' wrists
during physical exercise. See [15] for more information on the
competition. RAs Michael Muma and Tim Schäck recruited
seven students with interest and motivation in signal processing in August 2014. In total, approximately 270 undergraduate
students split among 66 teams registered for the competition.
"For the next months, we arranged regular meetings where
we discussed and developed different approaches," remembers
Tim Schäck. "We built a biomedical laboratory with our own
PPG sensors to be able to take measurements and collect additional data. For this, we employed a student with the necessary
hardware skills as an undergraduate research assistant whose
task was to develop a framework for the collection of measurements. Hence, the team members also had the option to gain
hands-on experience in our lab, which was much help to the
students in the competition.
"After submitting our algorithm and results in February
2015, we were more than happy to find out one month later
that our team was among the best three teams and that we were
invited to take part in the final competition at ICASSP 2015
in Brisbane, Australia. Fortunately, we managed to get five
students to fly to Brisbane and present the work at the finals.
As if this was not enough excitement for the students, their
presentation convinced the jury of the new method and Signal
Processing Crew Darmstadt won the IEEE Signal Processing

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

January 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - January 2017