IEEE Signal Processing - March 2018 - 161

toward the research and development of a
traffic sign detection system, which
might be able to aid autonomous vehicles. Team Markovians briefly expressed
their opinions about their VIP Cup experience as follows:
■ "Although we had no prior expertise
in the field, we did not stop short. We
started out from zero and constantly found ourselves at an impasse.
However, the support from our supervisor and mentor and the relentless
efforts from all the team members
was animating. We spent countless
hours, group sessions in weekends,
through holidays, and even before
exams for the project. The huge
amount of data we needed to process
required powerful hardware which
wasn't available to us. However, our
perseverance allowed us to proceed
with what we had and, at the end, we
came up with a working solution."
-Team Markovians

15-20 April 2018. The theme of the
competition is "Forensic Camera Model
Identification." For details, visit https://
signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/
signal-processing-cup.

Acknowledgments
The organizers of VIP Cup 2017 would
like to acknowledge and express their
gratitude to everyone involved in the first
VIP Cup journey including, but not limited to, Patrizio Campisi for initiating the
VIP Cup and his unmatched support
throughout the competition; Min-Hung
Chen and Tariq Alshawi for their significant roles in the organization including
data set preparation and algorithm validation; both Amy R. Reibman and Béatrice
Pesquet-Popescu for serving on the jury;
and participating teams for their hard
work, dedication, and inspirational
stories. Finally, the sponsorship by the
Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee of this VIP Cup is
much appreciated.

Organizers' opinions

Authors

It has been very inspiring to meet the
team members in person and hear their
stories. Their experience demonstrated
that, with dedication, one can compete
at the global level despite hardship, lack
of resources, and limited support. In
addition, this experience showed the
importance of mentorship exerted here
by professors who lead these undergraduate teams to excel. The dedication
of competing teams motivated the organizers to work tirelessly throughout
the competition.

Dogancan Temel (cantemel@gatech
.edu) received his B.S. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the
Middle East Technical University,
Ankara, Turkey, in 2011. He received his
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and
computer engineering from the Georgia
Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in
2013 and 2016, respectively, where he
is currently a postdoctoral fellow. He
was the recipient of the Best Doctoral
Dissertation Award from the Sigma Xi
honor society, the Graduate Research
Assistant Excellence Award from the School
of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
and the Outstanding Research Award
from the Center for Signal and Information
Processing at Georgia Tech.
Ghassan AlRegib (alregib@gatech
.edu) received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals,
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1997 and his
Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer
engineering from the Georgia Institute of
Technology (Georgia Tech) in 2003,
where he is a professor in the School of

Upcoming VIP Cup
The second edition of the VIP Cup will
be held at the 2018 ICIP in Athens,
Greece, 7-10 October 2018. Visit https://
signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/
video-image-processing-cup for
more information.
In addition to the VIP Cup, the SPS
announced the fifth edition of the SP
Cup. The final competition will be held
at the IEEE International Conference on
Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 2018 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada,

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

March 2018

Electrical and Computer Engineering. In
2012, he was named the director of
Georgia Tech's Center for Energy and
Geo Processing. He is a faculty member in the Center for Signal and Information Processing. He served as area editor
of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
(2007-2009), technical program (TP) cochair for IEEE GlobalSIP 2014, special
sessions chair for the IEEE International
Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)
in 2006, tutorial chair for ICIP 2009 and
ICIP 2016, and TP chair for ICIP 2020.
He is a member of the IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing Workshop and the IEEE
International Workshop on Multimedia
Signal Processing Technical Committees
(2015-2020). He was awarded the Electrical and Computer Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award
in 2008 and the Steven A. Denning Faculty Award for Global Engagement in
2017. He was the organizer and host of
the first IEEE Signal Processing Society
Video and Image Processing Cup competition in 2017. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

References

[1] D. Temel, T. Alshawi, M.-H. Chen, and G.
AlRegib (2017). CURE-TSD: Challenging unreal and
real environments for traffic sign detection. [Online].
Available: https://ghassanalregib.com/cure-tsd/
[2] D. Temel, G. Kwon, M. Prabhushankar, and G.
AlRegib, "CURE-TSR: Challenging unreal and real
environments for traffic sign recognition," Conf.
Neural Information Processing Systems Machine
Learning Intelligent Transportation Systems
Workshop, 2017.
[3] J. Lu, H. Sibai, E. Fabry, and D. Forsyth, "No
need to worry about adversarial examples in object
detection in autonomous vehicles," IEEE Conf.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Spotlight
Oral Workshop, 2017.
[4] N. Das, M. Shanbhogue, S.-T. Chen, F. Hohman,
L. Chen, M. E. Kounavis, and D. H. Chau, "Keeping
the bad guys out: Protecting and vaccinating deep
learning with jpeg compression," arXiv Preprint,
arXiv:1705.02900, 2017.
[5] K. Simonyan and A. Zisserman, "Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition," arXiv Preprint, arXiv:1409.1556, 2014.
[6] C. Szegedy, W. Liu, Y. Jia, P. Sermanet, S. Reed,
D. Anguelov, D. Erhan, V. Vanhoucke, and A.
Rabinovich "Going deeper with convolutions," in
Proc. IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition, 2015, pp. 1-9.
[7] M. Liang and X. Hu, "Recurrent convolutional
neural network for object recognition," in Proc. IEEE
Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition,
June 2015, pp. 3367-3375.

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https://signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/signal-processing-cup https://signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/signal-processing-cup https://signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/signal-processing-cup https://www.ghassanalregib.com/cure-tsd/ https://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/video-image-processing-cup https://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/video-image-processing-cup https://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/video-image-processing-cup

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Signal Processing - March 2018