Conference spotlight - ICIP'04 in the lion city-Singapore
he 2004 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), the eleventh in the series, will be held in Singapore 24–27 October at the Suntec Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre. Sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, ICIP is the world's largest and most comprehensive premium forum for the presentation of technological advances and research results in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and applied image and video processing. The conference has been held annually since 1994. Research frontiers in fields ranging from traditional image processing applications to evolving multimedia, such as image and video technologies, are regularly advanced by results first reported in ICIP technical sessions. Members of the ICIP'04 organizing committee are from local as well as overseas universities, with the majority coming from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), one of the three universities in Singapore. NTU, which focuses on technology, science, and business education, receives full support from the local government and industries. The engineering schools at NTU offer enriched curricula tailored to achieving a very close integration of fundamental theory with current engineering practices. The School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at NTU has many staff members actively researching in the area of digital signal processing and its applications in image and video processing. The other two universities are the National University of Singapore, the most comprehensive university in Singapore, and Singapore Management University, with its main focus-es in business and management education. We hope that hosting ICIP in Singapore will promote further advancement in the image and signal processing activities at both national and international levels. Located at the southern tip of Malaysia, the strategic position of Singapore provides the link between East and West, and this strategic importance has helped it to grow into a major hub for trade, communications , and tourism. This strategic location on major sea routes has given Singapore an economic impact in Southeast Asia. Singapore has the fifth highest per capita GDP in the world, thanks to the highly developed and successful free-market economy and the open and corruption-free business environment. Exports in electronics, chemicals, and service industries are the major drives of the economy. With heavy spending in education and technology, the government is establishing the country as the region's financial and high-tech hub. Singapore is a vibrant, multicultur-al, and sophisticated city-state, where tradition and modernity and East and West meet and interact comfortably and harmoniously. Visitors are provided with …