Undergraduate Students Compete in the IEEE Signal Processing Cup: Part 2 [sp Education]
T his is the second part to [1], which summarized the first two editions of the IEEE Signal Processing Cup. The perspectives of the competition organizers and the student finalists are given in this column. TC) [2] forwarded an e-mail to the members of the committee calling for proposals for the IEEE Signal Processing Society's (SPS's) First Signal Processing Cup. The idea was to promote signal processing , particularly its applications to solve real-world problems, among undergraduate students. I work at the Instruct Image Processing Center [3] in Madrid, Spain, a reference center for image processing in structural biology. The call for proposals was a perfect match between the need to achieve higher resolution in the three-dimensional (3-D) reconstructions of biological macromole-cules and the possibility to explore the recently introduced ideas in the areas of superresolution, image restoration, and denoising. The possibility of having students all over the world trying to tackle this problem sounded attractive and challenging. So, with the support of the BISP TC, the Instruct Image Processing Center submitted a proposal for enhancing the resolution achieved by electron microscopes in the elucidation of the structure of single particles. Students could be as creative as they wished as long as the resolution limit imposed by the microscope could be pushed toward atomic resolution. In August 2013, the proposal was approved by the SPS and, in November, we already had training and testing data sets available on the Internet. We also set up an online system [4] that allowed participants to self-evaluate their performances: they only had to upload their results to a web page and the system returned immediate feedback about the quality of their 3-D reconstructions. This system has been most valuable to empower the challengers and let them explore multiple directions while pursuing the most promising algorithms. The website activity, as well as the interaction of students with the organizers of the challenge, was quite high in the following months. algoriThm FinaliSTS The objective of the challenge was to enhance the resolution of macromolecular structures reconstructed from images taken by an electron microscope (EM) (see Figure 1). The best algorithm (Algorithm 1) consisted of three steps: 1) estimating the point spread function from the molecule background, 2) deconvolving with the Richardson–Lucy iterative algorithm, and 3) automatically detecting the location of the macromolecule and masking the output to produce a background-free volume. The second-best algorithm (Algorithm 2) …