I have recently come across a number of exciting news and links that provide more sources to learn and do DSP-related research.

First I learned that many journals from EURASIP (The European Association for Signal and Image Processing) have started to offer their material under the “open access” model. One of these is the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, which publishes papers aimed at both practicing engineers and academic researchers in topics such as communications, networking, sensors, radar and sonar, medical imaging, biomedical applications, astronomy, etc. These are great news because now everybody could access the papers here, which many are of really good quality (and I’m not saying this simply because I’ve been a reviewer and author for this publication, but because I do believe this is the case).

Since I’m talking about open access publications, one site that is worth checking from time to time is the Text Revolution web site, which provides links to textbooks that can be read online for free. DSP-related books can be found under the category of engineering or math.

Finally, Springer has recently announced a new journal due to come out in March 2007 with 4 issues per year. The journal title is “Signal, Image and Video Processing” and the Editor-in-Chief is Prof. Murat Kunt from EPFL / STI / ITS in Lausanne, Switzerland. Topics that will be cover include adaptive processing, biomedical signal processing, multimedia signal processing, communication signal processing, non-linear signal processing, array processing, statistical signal processing, modeling, filtering, multi-resolution, segmentation, coding, restoration, enhancement, storage and retrieval, colour and multi-spectral processing, scanning, displaying, motion detection and estimation, stereoscopic processing, etc. Papers may be published with open access at the choice of the authors.

It has been a very long time since my last post, let’s just say that the time demands of modern life have not been very kind to me lately… In any case, good news is that the Holidays are giving me that extra time to catch up with this blog.

Some weeks ago I intended to write about an interesting technology to store information that is heavily based on DSP technologies. The idea behind the technology is quite interesting and a nice example of outside-the-box thinking. In a nutshell, the idea is to store information on a piece of paper by using color coding. More interestingly, since I read the first article about this, there have been more discussions about the validity and practicality of this idea.

From my point of view, the discussion is itself interesting because it brings up a lot of issues related to several DSP technologies. From the creative standpoint, I believe that although there are many challenges with this technology in its current form, who knows where it can end and where the related DSP problems may take us to? I guess, it’s about the journey, not the destination.