My search for a new occupational challenge found a positive end: Center Communication Systems GmbH offered me a position at their Development Image Processing department. Their products include intelligent video surveillance systems that are able to detect uncommon situations e.g. in traffic. I’m with the algorithmicians that do applied research in and keep track with modern image processing methods. My tools seem to be a modern quad-core Linux PC, MATLAB and C++.
This position is indeed what I was looking for: I didn’t want to come too far away from signal processing or image processing, I stay in touch with the corresponding mathematics and can justify that it is really used in practice. I’m excited!