I am a Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) at ECIT/EEECS Queen’s University Belfast, UK. I am also an adjunct researcher with Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

I obtained my Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Cordelia Schmid and Dr. Karteek Alahari in Inria LEAR/THOTH team, France. My Ph.D. research was funded by the scholarship of the Microsoft Research - Inria joint center. I obtained my Master’s degree from Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, China, advised by Prof. Yuexian Zou.

I took charge of person re-identification project as a senior research scientist in AnyVision from 2016 to 2017. I engaged in a long-term research project and the related industrial product development as a senior R&D engineer in Panasonic R&D Center Singapore from 2008 to 2012.

My passion lies in guiding the computer to understand the world by research and development while helping students to understand the computer by teaching and mentoring.

My interests focus on fundamental research topics and real-world applications in computer vision and machine learning, specifically,

• Visual recognition and video understanding
• Visual learning with limited labeled data
• Robust representative learning and its interpretations
• Hardware-aware machine learning

• [Mar. 2020]: I passed lectureship probation and tenured position at Queen’s University Belfast, UK.
• [Dec. 2019]: One AAAI paper, two WACV papers, one ICCV paper, one CVPR paper, one MM paper, one BMVC paper, and one journal papers are published and accepted in 2019.
• [Dec. 2018]: One BIBM paper, one MM paper, one ECCV paper, one ICPR paper, and three journal papers are published and accepted in 2018.
• [May 2018]: Signed one-year collaboration contract with BBC NI for “Video Highlighting Toolkit”.
• [Jul. 2017]: One ICCV paper and one IMVIP paper are published in 2017.
• [Jun. 2017]: Talked about “Machine Learning Solutions to Visual Recognition Problems” and “How to do research” at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shen Zhen University and Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, respectively.
• [Jul. 2017]: I jointed Queen’s University Belfast, UK as a lecturer.
• [Sep. 2016]: I joined AnyVision as a Senior Research Scientist.
• [Jun. 2016]: I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis. Many thanks to my jury: Dr. Florent Perronnin (president), Dr. Patrick Pérez (reporter), Prof. Deva Ramanan (reporter), Prof. Jiří Matas (examiner), Dr. Cordelia Schmid (supervisor) and Dr. Karteek Alahari (co-supervisor).

• [2020.06 - 2021.05]: Intel gift funding @ SJTU, Co-I, $50,000
• [2020 - 2022]: Macular Society Research Grant, Co-I, £113,862
• [2020 - 2024]: EPSRC studentship plus industrial top-ups, UK, PI, £67,676 (3.5 years)
• [2019.06 - 2020.05]: Intel gift funding @ SJTU, Co-I, $50,000
• [2019.05 - 2021.04]: Industrial/Government fund, Singapore, Co-I, £275,000
• [2018.10 - 2021.08]: Industrial fund, UK, Co-I, £288,000
• [2017.11 - 2020.11]: Diabetes UK (British Diabetic Association), Co-I, £199,431

Peer-reviewed conference papers

2020

• Jian Gao, Yang Hua, Guosheng Hu, Chi Wang, Neil Robertson. Reducing Distributional Uncertainty by Mutual Information Maximisation and Transferable Feature Learning. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.
• Soumya Shubhra Ghosh, Yang Hua, Sankha Subhra Mukherjee and Neil Robertson. Improving Detection and Recognition of Degraded Faces by Discriminative Feature Restoration Using GAN. In International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2020.
• Weijuan Cao, Trevor Robinson, Yang Hua, Flavien Boussuge, Andrew R. Colligan and Wanbin Pan. Graph Representation of 3D CAD Models for Machining Feature Recognition with Deep Learning. In International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE), 2020.
• Hanming Deng, Yang Hua, Tao Song, Zhengui Xue, Ruhui Ma, Neil Robertson and Haibing Guan. Reinforcing Neural Network Stability with Attractor Dynamics. In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020.
• Changrui Chen, Xin Sun, Yang Hua, Junyu Dong, and Hongwei Xv. Learning Deep Relations to Promote Saliency Detection. In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020 (Oral).

2019

• Hanming Deng, Yang Hua, Tao Song, Zongpu Zhang, Zhengui Xue, Ruhui Ma, Neil Robertson and Haibing Guan. Object Guided External Memory Network for Video Object Detection. In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019.
• Xufeng He, Yang Hua, Tao Song, Zongpu Zhang, Zhengui Xue, Ruhui Ma, Neil Robertson and Haibing Guan. Unsupervised Video Summarization with Attentive Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks. In ACM Multimedia (MM), 2019.
• Shiyang Yan, Yang Hua, and Neil Robertson. SC-RANK: Improving Convolutional Image Captioning with Self-Critical Learning and Ranking Metric-based Reward. In British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2019.
• Xinshao Wang, Yang Hua, Elyor Kodirov, Guosheng Hu, Romain Garnier, and Neil Robertson. Ranked List Loss for Deep Metric Learning. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019.
• Xinshao Wang, Yang Hua, Elyor Kodirov, Guosheng Hu, and Neil Robertson. Deep Metric Learning by Online Soft Mining and Class-Aware Attention. In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2019 (oral).
• Alessandro Borgia, Yang Hua, Elyor Kodirov, and Neil Robertson. GAN-based Pose-aware Regulation for Video-based Person Re-identification. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2019 (oral).
• Soumya Ghosh, Yang Hua, Sankha Subhra Mukherjee, and Neil Robertson. IEGAN: Multi-purpose Perceptual Quality Image Enhancement Using Generative Adversarial Network. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2019 (oral).

2018

• Shuo Wang, Yang Hua, Yunyun Cao, Tao Song, Zhengui Xue, Xiaoping Gong, Guanjie Wang, Ruhui Ma, and Haibing Guan. Deep Learning based Fetal Middle Cerebral Artery Segmentation in Large-scale Ultrasound Images. In International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) 2018 (Regular paper).
• Zongpu Zhang, Yang Hua, Tao Song, Zhengui Xue, Ruhui Ma, Neil Robertson, and Haibing Guan. Tracking-assisted Weakly Supervised Online Visual Object Segmentation in Unconstrained Videos. In ACM MultiMedia (MM) 2018.
• Guosheng Hu, Li Liu, Yang Yuan, Zehao Yu, Yang Hua, Zhihong Zhang, Fumin Shen, Ling Shao, Timothy Hospedales, Neil Robertson, Yongxin Yang. Deep Multi-Task Learning to Recognise Subtle Facial Expressions of Mental States. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018.
• Yihan Du, Yan Yan, Si Chen, Yang Hua, Hanzi Wang. Object-Adaptive LSTM Network for Visual Tracking. In International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2018.

2017

• Guosheng Hu, Yang Hua, Yang Yuan, Zhihong Zhang, Zheng Lu, Sankha S. Mukherjee, Timothy M. Hospedales, Neil M. Robertson, Yongxin Yang. Attribute-Enhanced Face Recognition with Neural Tensor Fusion Network. In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (spotlight). PDF
• Alessandro Borgia, Yang Hua, Neil M. Robertson. A Tale of Two Losses: Discriminative Deep Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification. In Irish Machine Vision and Image Processing Conference (IMVIP), (Oral).

Before 2016

• Yang Hua, Karteek Alahari, and Cordelia Schmid. Online object tracking with proposal selection. In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015. PDF Project Code-PST Code-sPST
• Yang Hua, Karteek Alahari, and Cordelia Schmid. Occlusion and motion reasoning for long-term tracking. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2014. PDF Project
• Qiang Chen, Zheng Song, Yang Hua, Zhongyang Huang, and Shuicheng Yan. Hierarchical matching with side information for image classification. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2012.
• Zheng Song, Qiang Chen, Zhongyang Huang, Yang Hua, and Shuicheng Yan. Contextualizing object detection and classification. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2011.
• Yang Hua and Yuexian Zou. Analysis of the packet transferring in L2CAP layer of Bluetooth v2.x+EDR. In IEEE International Conference on Information and Automation (ICIA), 2008.

Peer-reviewed journal papers

• Yihan Du, Yan Yan, Si Chen, and Yang Hua. Object-Adaptive LSTM Network for Real-time Visual Tracking with Adversarial Data Augmentation. Neurocomputing, 384:67-83, 2020.
• Andrew R. Colligan, Trevor T. Robinson, Declan C. Nolan and Yang Hua. Point Cloud Dataset Creation for Machine Learning on CAD Models. Computer-Aided Design and Applications. 2020. Accepted.
• Lei Zhang, Yang Hua, Simon L. Cotton, Seong Ki Yoo, Claudio R. C. M. Da Silva and William G. Scanlon. An RSS-Based Classification of User Equipment Usage in Indoor Millimeter Wave Wireless Networks using Machine Learning. IEEE Access, 8(1):14928-14943, 2020.
• Yi Tang, Wenbin Zou, Yang Hua, Zhi Jin, and Xia Lia. Video Salient Object Detection via Spatiotemporal Attention Neural Networks. Neurocomputing, 377:27-37, 2020.
• Yi Tang, Wenbin Zou, Yang Yuan, Zhi Jin, Yuhuan Chen, Yang Hua, and Xia Li. Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection with Spatiotemporal Cascade Neural Networks. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 29(7):1973-1984, 2019.
• Alessandro Borgia, Yang Hua, Elyor Kodirov, and Neil Robertson. Cross-view Discriminative Feature Learning for Person Re-Identification. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 27(11):5338-5349, 2018.
• Zongpu Zhang, Tao Song, Liwei Lin, Yang Hua, Xufeng He, Zhengui Xue, Ruhui Ma, and Haibing Guan. Towards Ubiquitous Intelligent Computing: Heterogeneous Distributed Deep Neural Networks. IEEE Transaction on Big Data. Early Access.
• Qiang Chen, Zheng Song, Jian Dong, Zhongyang Huang, Yang Hua, and Shuicheng Yan. Contextualizing object detection and classification. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 37(1):13–27, 2015.
• Qiang Chen, Meng Wang, Zhongyang Huang, Yang Hua, Zheng Song, and Shuicheng Yan. Videopuzzle: Descriptive one-shot video composition. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 15(3):521–534, 2013.

Other papers

• Michael Felsberg, Amanda Berg, Gustav Hager, Jorgen Ahlberg, Matej Kristan, Jiri Matas, Ales Leonardis, Luka Cehovin, Gustavo Fernandez, Tomas Vojir, et al. The thermal infrared visual object tracking VOT-TIR2015 challenge results. In ICCV Workshop on Visual Object Tracking Challenge 2015. PDF Slides
• Matej Kristan, Jiri Matas, Ales Leonardis, Michael Felsberg, Luka Cehovin, Gustavo Fernandez, Tomas Vojir, Gustav Hager, Georg Nebehay, Roman Pflugfelder, et al. The visual object tracking VOT2015 challenge results. In ICCV Workshop on Visual Object Tracking Challenge 2015. PDF Slides

Ph.D. thesis

• Yang Hua. Towards Robust Visual Object Tracking: Proposal Selection & Occlusion Reasoning. Microsoft Research - Inria Joint Centre, Inria Grenoble, Rhone-Alpes, France. 2016. PDF Slides

• [2019]: Recognition reward in line with the University’s core value of Excellence, EEECS, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom
• [2015]: Winning tracker of VOT-TIR2015 challenge in conjunction with ICCV 2015, Chile
• [2014]: Student grant of European Conference on Computer Visions (ECCV) 2014, Switzerland
• [2013 - 2015]: PhD scholarship, Microsoft Research - Inria Joint Center, France
• [2012]: High Quality Patent Award, Panasonic R&D Center Singapore, Singapore
• [2010 - 2012]: Joint winner of PASCAL VOC Challenge Classification Competition (three times) in conjunction with ECCV 2010 (Greece), ICCV 2011 (Spain) and ECCV 2012 (Italy), respectively
• [2006] “Zhong Ying” scholarship, Peking University, China

• [2020 - 2021, QUB]: Individual Research Project (CSC4006)
• [2019 Fall, QUB]: How to do research (Half-day course, PhD Structured Development)
• [2019 Fall, QUB]: Database and Programming Fundamentals (DSA8002, MSc in Data Analytics)
• [2019 Summer, SJTU]: Frontiers in Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence (Four lectures, summer course)
• [2018 Fall, QUB]: How to do research (Half-day course, PhD Structured Development)
• [2018 Fall, QUB]: Database and Programming Fundamentals (DSA8002, MSc in Data Analytics)
• [2018 Spring, QUB]: How to do research (Half-day course, PhD Structured Development)
• [2017 Fall, QUB]: Database and Programming Fundamentals (DSA8002, MSc in Data Analytics)

Ph.D. Students

• Soumya Shubhra Ghosh (2017 - , EEECS, co-supervising with Prof. Robertson)
• Jian Gao (2018 - , EEECS, co-supervising with Prof. Robertson)
• Chi Wang (2019 - , EEECS, co-supervising with Prof. Robertson)
• Guanxiong Sun (2019 - , EEECS, co-supervising with Prof. Robertson)
• Andrew Colligan (2018 - , MAE, co-supervising with Dr Trevor Robinson and Dr Declan Nolan)
• Dónal McLaughlin (2020 - , EEECS, co-supervising with Prof. Robertson)
• Yuhui Cheng (2020 - , M&P, co-supervising with Dr Zhiwei Lin)

Alumni

• Xinshao Wang (2017.9 - 2020.7, PhD student, EEECS, co-supervising with Prof. Neil Robertson, PhD thesis: Example Weighting for Deep Representation Learning, first job: PDRA at Oxford University, UK)

Review

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Neurocomputing, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Multimedia Tools and Applications, and The Computer Journal

Conference

CVPR, ICCV, EECV, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, BMVC, WACV, ACCV and ICME

Invited Talks

• “Addition, Subtraction and Geometry in Person Re-identification” at the 2nd International Workshop on Big Surveillance Data Analysis and Processing (BIG-Surv) in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), London, UK, July, 2020
• “Machine Learning Solutions to Visual Recognition Problems 2” at China Electronics Technology Group Corporation No.38 Institute and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, China, May 25 and 28, 2018
• “Machine Learning Solutions to Visual Recognition Problems” at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shen Zhen University and Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, China, June 26, 29, 30, 2017
• “How to do research” at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shen Zhen University and Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, China, June 26, 29, 30, 2017
• “Towards robust visual object tracking: Proposal selection and occlusion reasoning” at ECIT, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom, September 9, 2016
• “Online object tracking with proposal selection” at ICCV Workshop on Visual Object Tracking Challenge, Santiago, Chile, December 12, 2015
• “Tracking people in the wild” at MSR/Inria Joint Centre, Paris, France, May 19, 2014

Industrial Visiting Program

• Visited the vision group of International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley directed by Prof. Trevor Darrell, Berkeley, CA, USA, Jan-Apr, 2010

• Zhongyang Huang, Yang Hua, Shuicheng Yan, Qiang Chen, Ryouichi Kawanishi, 8,897,578 (U.S. patent), 2014
• Zhongyang Huang, Yang Hua, Shuicheng Yan, Qiang Chen, Ryouichi Kawanishi, 8,958,646 (U.S. patent), 2013
• Yang Hua, Shuicheng Yan, Zhongyang Huang, Sheng Mei Shen, Ryouichi Kawanishi, 8,687,851 (U.S. patent), 102667859B (China patent), 2012