WHAT IS SIGNAL AND IMAGE PROCESSING?
A common question by students considering the field has been, what is the signal and image processing option about? What is the difference between signal and image processing, and communications theory and systems or what is the difference between signal and image processing and control systems etc.

For starters, a description of the Signal and Image processing option can be found in the ECE dept home page. The description is brief and describes the area with a stress on the research interests of the faculty at UC San Diego. To learn more about the Signal and Image processing field, the home page of the Signal Processing Society, a technical society of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), is a good starting point. The IEEE is the world's largest technical professional society. The technical Societies of the IEEE provide publications, conferences, colleagueship, and many other benefits to members within 37 specialized areas. The Signal Processing Society is IEEE's first Society and its fourth largest of IEEE's 38 technical divisions (only the Computer, Communications, and Power Engineering Societies are larger). The Signal Processing Society comprises about 22,000 members worldwide; 58% of these are in the United States; 20% are located in Europe and North Africa; 15% are from the Far East and the Pacific Rim.

The Signal Processing Information Base (SPIB) is another useful source of information about signal and image processing activities. It also contains information about some useful newsgroups relevant to SIP. Other interesting sites are Bob Gray's Signal Processing and the International Information Infrastructure web page, DSPnet, RASSP, DSP at Rice, Japan. More can be found by simply doing a net search using the keyword "Signal Processing." The contents of the publications and conferences of the signal processing society also give additional insight into the signal and image processing field. The subjects covered by some key journals in the SIP area are provided for your perusal. They are

Other important publications of this society are the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and the IEEE Signal Processing Letters. The important conferences and conference pubications are IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal processing, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, Workshop on Statistical Signal and Array Processing etc. There are also several other IEEE Journals published by the other societies that are relevant to SIP research such as the Proc. of IEEE, IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks, IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence ...

Signal and Image processing publications are not entirely an IEEE activity. There are many other important publications in this area. They are, to name a few, IEE Proceedings - Vision, Image and Signal Processing, Signal Processing, Elsevier Science Publishers, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, EUSIPCO conference, Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition(CVPR).

For students who are trying to decide between signal and image processing, and closely related areas like communication systems, control systems, circuits and system, it may be worthwhile to examine the homepage of these respective IEEE technical societies and the description of these activities in the ECE department homepage. In case you are still unable to decide, the good news is that the basic preparation required of these areas is quite similar, and so the choice is not very critical at the early stages of the program. At this point, you may want to examine the course requirements of each area, and choose the one that best meets your goals.

Good Luck with your choices.