Prof. Shoji Tominaga earned his B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1970, 1972, and 1975, respectively. He was a Professor (2006-2013), Dean (2011-2013), and a Specially Appointed Researcher (2013-2018) at the Graduate School of Advanced Integration Science, Chiba University, Japan.  Currently, he is an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway, and a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Business and Informatics of Nagano University, Japan. Prof. Shoji Tominaga has made several important contributions to color image science and technology. His contributions, spanning more than thirty-five years, range from the fundamentals of color imaging to its computer vision applications. He has contributed in particular reflectance analysis, material appearance, color constancy, illuminant estimation, and spectral imaging. He is an Honorary Member of the Color Science Association of Japan, a Fellow Member of the Optical Society of America (OSA), the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T), and a Life Fellow Member of IEEE and SPIE.

Prof. Hideaki Sakai received his BE and DE degrees in applied mathematics and physics from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1972 and 1981, respectively. From 1997 to 2013, he was a Professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Physics and the Department of Systems Science at Kyoto University. He is now a Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University. His research interests include adaptive and statistical signal processing. He served twice as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and as a General Co-Chair of ICASSP 2012 in Kyoto. He was elected as a Fellow of IEEE in 2007 and is now a Life Fellow.