Structural biology has become one of most important tools to understand the fundamental principles of life. Three-dimensional reconstruction of cryo-electron microscopy (3DEM) has multiple advantages, among them the investigation the structures of large macromolecular complexes. In recent years, 3DEM has gone into its evolution phase along with the significant advancements in specimen preparation, hardware development and image processing algorithms. With these advancements, there are lots of complicated macromolecular complexes whose structures could impossibly be determined by crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy but now have been solved with close to near atomic resolution using 3DEM. Nowadays, solving the structures of macromolecular complexes in near-atomic resolution by using cryo-electron microscopy based single particle analysis (SPA) has become reality. However, a few challenges still exist ahead, which include: - how to cope with the current limitation to push resolving resolution into atomic level, - whether it is possible and how to get near atomic resolution structures for small-sized molecules (150~300kDa), - how to deal with conformational heterogeneity for high resolution structural determination, - how to validate the high resolution cryoEM map and how to build atomic models based on the cryoEM map in the current resolution and thereby realize model building validation. With the development of correlative imaging technology, cryo-electron tomography (cryoET) and sub-volume averaging technique, it is achievable to get a 3D structure of macromolecular complexes in their native cellular environment and viral envelop and molecular chaperonin with sub-nanometer resolution. To observe the near-atomic structural details of most macromolecular complexes in their intact cellular state is a great dream for all the structural biologists in the world. Is that goal possible in principle? How far are we from that goal? What types of bottlenecks shall we address in the current situation? To deal with the above challenges and answer those questions, besides developing new sample preparation methods and advanced hardware (future microscopes and cameras and phase plates), great efforts on novel image processing algorithms and software are also necessary. In order to introduce the most cutting-edge method and algorithm to the students and young scientists in the structural biology field, especially to the Chinese 3DEM community, in 2015, we are organizing an international workshop focusing on the frontiers of image processing with high-resolution single particle analysis, electron tomography reconstruction and sub-tomogram averaging technique. The workshop will last five days (from June 3rd to 7th) with lectures in the morning and practice courses in the afternoon, followed by evening discussion of the in-depth application of software packages. The approximate number of attendees for the morning courses will be expected as 100~150 and the maximum number for the afternoon practices are restricted to 25. However, those attendees who could not attend the afternoon practice sessions can bring their own notebooks to another video room and watch the real-time video of the practice session. Both basic principles of image processing, model building, model validation and advanced imaging processing algorithms, as well as their applications will be taught and discussed during the workshop. The practical sessions will be organized to show the hand-on experiences of using the state-of-the-art image processing packages to deal with the real projects. Graduate students and postdocs who currently work in the 3DEM field are particularly encouraged to attend the workshop. Importantly, a number of leading scientists in the field will be lecturing at the workshop; young scientists will have plenty of opportunities to directly interact with these leading scientists.