A city‐like ensemble overlooking the Marmara Sea and the Bosphorus, Istanbul’s legendary Topkapi Palace became a synonym for Ottoman history and the heart of a far‐flung empire for 400 years. Transformed into a museum, it houses a vast and disparate treasure. Presenting both the splendours of the palace and the richness of its collections on the Internet was the challenge described below. The authors, all with backgrounds in electrical engineering, are professionally involved in areas of advanced research in the new technologies. After having served as visiting associate professor at the University of Minnesota in the United States, A. Enis Cetin is a professor at Bilkent University in Ankara and chairman of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)‐EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) Nonlinear Signal and Image Processing Workshop, held in Ankara in June 1999. Omer N. Gerek is currently with the Signal Processing Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology‐EPFL in Lausanne (on leave from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey). Ahmed H. Tewfik is a professor of electronic communications at the University of Minnesota and was the first Editor‐in‐Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters in 1993.