Signal Processing - September 2016 - 3

FROM THE EDITOR
Min Wu | Editor-in-Chief | minwu@umd.edu

Blurred Boundaries

W

hat is signal processing and what
isn't? From time to time, I would
come across comments related
to this question from independent reviews regarding whether an article that
was submitted to IEEE Signal Processing Magazine fit the scope. I have
seen reviewers recommending an article surveying signal processing techniques for wireless communications to
a communications-related publication
instead, or an article related to imaging
or image analysis to a computer visionrelated venue.
This would have been commonly accepted several decades ago when various fields under the IEEE umbrella were
well partitioned into different technical
Societies. The IEEE Signal Processing
Society (SPS) traces its roots to 1948 as
the IEEE's first Society, with the name
and scope as the Professional Group
on Audio of the then Institute of Radio
Engineers (IRE), the predecessor of the
IEEE. Looking at the historic roster of
the SPS's technical committees (TCs)
(as shown in "SPS Technical Committees Then and Now: Evolved and Broadened Scope of Signal Processing"), we
can see that just 40 years ago in 1976
when the Society's first flagship conference, the International Conference
on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), was launched, there
were only five SPS TCs, and they were
dealing with either signal processing

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2016.2590603
Date of publication: 2 September 2016

SPS Technical Committees Then and Now:
Evolved and Broadened Scope of Signal Processing
Year: 1976

Year: 2016

Digital signal processing

Audio and acoustic signal processing

Digital measurement of noise

Bioimaging and signal processing

Electroacoustic transducers

Design and implementation of signal processing and systems

Speech processing

Image, video, and multidimensional signal processing

Underwater acoustics

Information forensics and security
Machine learning for signal processing

Year: 1987

Multimedia signal processing

Audio and electroacoustics

Sensor array and multichannel

Digital signal processing

Signal processing for communication and networking

Multidimensional signal processing

Signal processing theory and methods

Spectral estimation and modeling

Speech and language processing

Speech processing

Industry DSP technology standing committee

Underwater acoustics

Special interest groups: Big Data, Computational Imaging,
and Internet of Things

VLSI for signal processing

theories and methods, or speech and
acoustics. There was little mention of
communications nor much presence of
visual processing in the SPS TC structure, even though many fundamental
signal processing theories and techniques had been used rather extensively
in those areas and further extended and
adapted to solve the problems there.
Moving forward about ten years, we see
that visual aspects in a more general
sense of multidimensional signal processing were added to the TC list by the
mid-1980s. And now, 40 years later, we
see more than a dozen TCs in the SPS,
with a diverse range of "new" areas explicitly embraced, including communiIEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE

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September 2016

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cations and networking, multimedia
signal processing, biomedical-related
signal processing, and information forensics and security.
Year after year, signal processing, together with other fields, have
evolved, and the boundaries between
several traditionally separate fields
have been blurred. Many colleagues
have been actively involved in multiple
technical societies, fostering interaction
and bringing beneficial aspects between
fields. Innovations have often happened
at the boundaries between traditionally
separate fields.
(continued on p. 7)
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - September 2016
