Digital Signal Processing – the collection, transformation, presentation, and interpretation of data (signals, images, audio, video, etc.) to extract and better transmit information – has evolved from an obscure mathematical research discipline into an essential technology of everyday life. Over the past several decades, signal processing algorithms and hardware have been under increasing pressure to accommodate:

• larger and higher-dimensional data sets, including high-resolution images and video, three-dimensional (3-D) audio, astronomical observations, and biomedical measurements;
• faster capture, sampling, and processing rates;
• lower power consumption in order to permit remote, networked, battery operation for long periods;
• communication over ever more difficult wireless non-Gaussian channels;
• new and multiple sensing modalities.

FORTUNATELY: We have been moving from a digital signal processing paradigm, where analog signals are sampled periodically and processed centrally, to a distributed information processing paradigm, where analog signals are “randomly” sensed in space and time, and processed locally to extract key information in a distributed fashion.

Research in SPL aspires to be at the forefront of signal processing with fundamental work on the development of image, audio, and speech signal processing theory based on non-Gaussian statistics, sinusoidal modeling, sparse representations, and compressed sensing. SPL researchers are active in applying state of the art signal processing techniques to a wide range of real world problems. Recent applications include distributed signal processing, immersive audio and multichannel audio coding, video image compression, speech synthesis with emphasis on voice conversion, speech enhancement, and other multimedia related technologies.

SPL maintains research collaboration with other laboratories within FORTH-ICS including TNL, CBML and CVRL and has close academic ties with the Department of Computer Science and other departments and institutes within the University of Crete. SPL currently consists of 3 faculty, 2 post-doctoral fellows, 9 graduate students, and 4 undergraduate students. Researchers in SPL are involved in a range of interdisciplinary research projects maintaining several active international collaborations with both academic and industrial partners across Europe, the US and Asia. Most recent ones include the Universities of Valencia and of the Basque Country, Spain; CEA/Saclay, France Telecom, and SAGEM, France; KTH, Sweden; the University of Southern California, USA; TWS, Italy; Cidana, China. Funding of this research has mainly been provided by the European Commission.