The Fifth IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI ’08) will be held May 14-17, 2008 in Paris, France. Registration for the IEEE ISBI 2008 conference is now open at http://www.biomedicalimaging.org/Registration.asp. Travel awards supported by NIH/NIBIB for US-based young investigators are also available; applications are due by March 18th, 2008. Travel awards supported by the Region Ile de France are also  available for France-based
young investigators with applications also due by March 18th, 2008.

Some time ago I wrote about how I was intending to use this blog to highlight research in DSP that is worth learning about so as to help starting constructive discussion about new DSP ideas or theories. I finally found the time to write about a paper I recently finished reading. The paper reference is:

B. Foo, Y. Andreopoulos and M. van der Schaar, “Analytical Rate-Distortion-Complexity Modeling of Wavelet-based Video Coder”, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 56, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2008, pp.: 797-815.

The paper can be found at ieeexplore or from one of the authors’ web pages at University College London

The title pretty much says it all what the paper is about. The paper presents an analytical model that accurately predicts the rate, distortion and decoding complexity of wavelet-based video coders. This main contribution is important because it is actually rare to find research presenting accurate analytical models of the rate, distortion or complexity in video codecs. Most of the works out there present some analysis but they invariably rely on exhaustive simulations to match some parameter or variable. This is not the case with this paper, which bases most of the analysis on deriving probabilities for the significance of blocks and coefficients with different quantization threshold. Also, the fact that the paper deals with the less common (at least for now) wavelet-based video coders is not really a problem because the analysis can be applied or extended in many cases to other types of video coders, which is another of the positives of this paper.
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It’s interesting that in my last post I kind of complained of the few blogs about DSP. Well, I was brought to the attention of a nice ore year blog about DSP applied to communications. The name of the blog is “DSP log” and it lives at http://www.dsplog.com/. The main goal of this blog is to explain concepts in digital communications and DSP at the level of a text book. Manyexplanations are illustrated with octave scripts. Some of the recent topics where Frequency offset estimation using 802.11a short preamble, Peak to Average Power Ratio for OFDM and Cyclic prefix in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing.

It is unfortunate that there are so few blogs about DSP so it is worth noting the ones out there. I was recently brought to the attention of the blog at http://dsignalp.blogspot.com/.

The IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom) will take place between Nov. 30 and Dec. 4, in New Orleans, LA, U.S.A.

The call for papers can be found in this link. The deadline for paper submission is March 15, 2008.

The IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) will take place between May 19 and May 23, in Beijing, China.

The IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) will take place between June 23 and June 26, in Hannover, Germany.

The 5^th IEEE Workshop on Sensor Array and Multi-Channel Signal Processing will take place at Darmstadt, Germany, from July 21 to July 23. The SAM Workshop is the principal IEEE conference devoted to sensor array and multi-channel signal processing.

The call for papers can be found in this link. The deadline for paper submission is January 20, 2008.

The 33rd International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) will take place between March 30 and April 4, in Las Vegas, NV, U.S.A. at the Caesars Palace, a truly spectacular location. By the way, I found the conference web page as a very nice Las Vegas-themed web page.

A list of accepted papers can be found in this link.

The IEEE 2008 Workshop on Signal Processing Systems will take place in Washington DC, U.S.A., from Oct. 8 through Oct. 10. SiPS is a major international forum for discussion of new technology progress and innovations in the design and implementation of multimedia and telecom oriented digital signal processing systems.

The deadline for paper submission is April 2, 2008.