IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 20, NO.

12, DECEMBER 2011

3321

New Challenges for Image Processing Research

T HAS BEEN almost two years since I took over as the Editor-in-Chief of the TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING. It has been a very busy time but a lot of fun. I have learned a lot in my interactions with authors, reviewers, and associate editors, as well as volunteers and staff of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. One of my goals has been to embrace new areas of research while maintaining a solid signal processing foundation. Advances in technology and emerging applications open up new opportunities and challenges for the image and video processing community. It is our duty to identify new areas of research in which signal processing can have a signicant impact and to bring them under the transactions umbrella. Since such areas are increasingly multidisciplinary, it is critical to broaden the perspective of the transactions by putting more emphasis on topics such as human perception, acquisition and display devices, as well as interactivity and humancomputer interfaces. I am thus excited to introduce this issues Overview article on computational photography, Computational Cameras: Convergence of Optics and Processing, by Changyin Zhou and Shree Nayar. Computational photography has been one of the most important emerging research areas at the intersection of optics, sensing, displays, and signal processing. It aims to exploit hardware and software advances in order to transform the way we capture, manipulate, and display visual information. It is expected to have an impact that extends beyond professional and consumer photography, to robotics, medicine, surveillance, virtual reality, metrology, and humancomputer interfaces. Shree Nayar has been one of the acknowledged leaders of this eld, and with Changyin Zhou, they bring their rich and insightful perspective to our community.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TIP.2011.2172110

As we move forward and attempt to elevate the transactions to the next level, I would like to emphasize the importance of attracting high-quality papers in emerging areas of research and new approaches for solving problems, as opposed to important but incremental work. Of course, we also welcome papers that provide solid contributions that advance well-established areas. During the past few years, interest in the transactions has increased with over 100 submissions per month. The task of reviewing these papers is enormous. For this, we rely on all of you, the top researchers in the image processing area, readers, authors, and editors, to serve as reviewers. We have also assembled an impressive team of associate editors that cover a wide range of topics, from image processing fundamentals to models of human perception, different imaging modalities, compressive sensing, imaging and video networks, scene analysis, and biomedical and biological image processing. In addition to the plurality of technical interests, our associate editors also cover a broad geographical range, both of which reect the diversity of the image and video processing community. Our goal is to transform the increased number of submissions into the highest standards of quality for the published papers. To this end, we have been continuously raising the standards of acceptance and the quality of feedback we offer to our authors. Above all, the key to the technical excellence of a journal is the quality of submissions. I thus encourage all of you to submit your best work.

THRASOS N. PAPPAS, Guest Editor Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208 USA

Thrasyvoulos N. Pappas (M87SM95F06) received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1979, 1982, and 1987, respectively, all in electrical engineering and computer science. From 1987 until 1999, he was a Member of the Technical Staff with Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. In 1999, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (now EECS), Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, where he is currently a Full Professor. His research interests are in human perception and electronic media, and in particular, image and video quality and compression, image and video analysis, content-based retrieval, model-based halftoning, and tactile and multimodal interfaces. Dr. Pappas is a Fellow of the SPIE. He is currently the Editor-In-Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING. He has served as an Elected Member of the Board of Governors of the Signal Processing Society of IEEE (20042007), Chair of the IEEE Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee (20022003), and Technical Program Cochair of the International Conference on Image Processing in 2001 and 2009. He has also served as a Cochair of the 2005 SPIE/IS&T Electronic Imaging Symposium. Since 1997, he has been a Cochair of the SPIE/IS&T Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging. He has served in the editorial boards of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, the IS&T/SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging, and the Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing.

1057-7149/$26.00 2011 IEEE