[Welcome two]

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 2011 18th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing in Brussels, the world capital of beer and chocolate! Hopefully attending ICIP 2011 will stimulate both your palate as your intellect and will be an exciting, fruitful, and inspiring experience. This year we have received 2245 paper submissions from 67 countries spread all over the globe. The Asia/ Pacific region provided 44.4% of the authors, Europe, the Middle East and Africa 37.0%, North America 15.6%, and Latin America 3.0%. The organizing committee had all submitted papers subjected to peer evaluation by 1113 volunteers who were selected based on their expertise area. They provided over 7,000 reviews, i.e., an average of about 3.2 per paper. The review process was managed per EDICS domain by 61 Area Chairs who are members of the Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, members of the Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) Technical Committee, or otherwise leading researchers within the IEEE Signal Processing Society Image Processing community. The Area Chairs monitored the review process and made recommendations for each paper. A total of 889 regular papers (40.6 %) have been accepted and are presented in 48 lectures and 42 poster sessions. We would like to sincerely thank everybody involved in the review process: your individual contributions have shaped the ICIP 2011 program.