On behalf of all the organizing committee, we would like to warmly welcome you to the 20th European Signal Processing Conference EUSIPCO 2012, the flagship conference of the European Signal Processing (EURASIP) Society.

Summertime is EUSIPCO time and this year we are really proud to host EUSIPCO in Bucharest, Romania. The conference will be held at the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest and is organized by University Politehnica of Bucharest and Télécom ParisTech.

The focus will be on signal processing theory, algorithms, and applications. Papers are accepted based on quality, relevance, and novelty and accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of EUSIPCO 2012 and indexed in the main bibliographic databases. We are very happy to announce that for the first time the proceedings of EUSIPCO will be available not only through the Open Library of EURASIP, but also indexed by the IEEEXplore database.

In the early times of EUSIPCO, signal processing was an emerging research area mostly targeting post-graduate work. This is not the case anymore. Nowadays, signal processing has become the cornerstone of many other engineering disciplines, such as multimedia communications or power engineering. EUSIPCO is a living example that signal processing is (and will continue to be) a research field in rapid evolution and growth.

We are witness of a really dramatic change in the way of thinking about the signal: from the low-level information, as a string of numerical-values, we have now a new perspective dealing with high-level informational sources, symbolic-values revealing their essential significance.

Since EUSIPCO 1990, EURASIP has successfully introduced many changes in this conference. Currently, the conference offers a number of tutorials (which, as in previous years, are included in the registration fee), special sessions, as well as social and cultural events. Besides, four EURASIP members, all of them being truly exceptional people, will be elevated to the category of EURASIP Fellow. Another major event is the EURASIP General Assembly, held every two years, which allows renewing the members of the Board of Governors of our organization. Just after it, the annual award ceremony will be held, featuring the Technical Achievement, Group Technical Achievement, Meritorious Service and the Athanasios Papoulis awards.

Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all the members of the organizing committee and our colleagues on the Conference Board of EURASIP for their support and effort. We are especially grateful to the technical program committee of EUSIPCO 2012 coordinated by Prof. Pier Luigi Dragotti, from Imperial College, London, and Prof. Vladimir Stankovic, from University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Our special thanks also go to the local committee, all the Area Chairs and the whole team of reviewers.

We sincerely hope that you will have an enjoyable stay in Bucharest, and that you will find EUSIPCO 2012 an interesting and inspiring conference.

Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu and Corneliu Burileanu,
EUSIPCO 2012 General Chairs