The series of international symposia on Image and Signal Processing and Analysis (ISPA) has started in 2000 as a workshop that was organized in conjunction with ITI 2000 conference in Croatia. The workshop was co-sponsored by EURASIP and by IEEE Region 8 and printed proceedings were published. The goal of the workshop was to bring together researchers working in the area of signal and image processing. Most of the thirty participants of the workshop came from Europe but there were also participants from other continents.
The second ISPA meeting was organized in 2001, in conjunction with ITI 2001 conference. ISPA'01 had about 130 participants from all over the world, which was a large increase in the number of participants. The name of the meeting was slightly changed by replacing the word "workshop" to "symposium". The symposium was co-sponsored by EURASIP and by IEEE Region 8 and printed and CD-ROM proceedings were published. During the meeting, a decision was made by the Program Committee to organize ISPA every other year, in order to address the issue of ever growing number of conferences.
In the third year, ISPA'03 is moving into another country (Italy) in the spirit of a true international meeting. We hope that the future ISPA meetings will be organized in many different coutries, connecting researchers and breaking geographical and political boundaries.