I am a Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) at ECIT/EEECS Queen’s University Belfast, UK and collaborate closely with Prof. Neil M. Robertson. 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

• [Dec 2019]: Two AAAI papers, one ICCV paper, one CVPR paper, one MM paper, one BMVC paper, and one journal papers are accepted in 2019.
• [Nov 2018]: One AAAI paper, two WACV papers, one BIBM paper, one MM paper, one ECCV paper, one ICPR paper, and three journal papers (IEEE transactions) are accepted in 2018.
• [May 2018]: Signed one-year collaboration contract with BBC NI for “Video Highlighting Toolkit”.
• [Jul. 2017]: Two papers accepted at ICCV2017 and IMVIP2017.
• [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.
• [Feb. 2017]: I accepted the offer of lecturership at Queen’s University Belfast, UK.
• [Sep. 2016]: I joined AnyVision as a 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).

• [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

• 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 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 BMVC 2019.
• Xinshao Wang, Yang Hua, Elyor Kodirov, Guosheng Hu, Romain Garnier, and Neil Robertson. Ranked List Loss for Deep Metric Learning. In 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 (oral).
• 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 ECCV 2018.
• Yihan Du, Yan Yan, Si Chen, Yang Hua, Hanzi Wang. Object-Adaptive LSTM Network for Visual Tracking. In 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 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 IMVIP 2017 (Oral).

Before 2016

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

Peer-reviewed journal papers

• Yi Tang, Wenbin Zou, Yang Hua, Zhi Jin, and Xia Lia. Video Salient Object Detection via Spatiotemporal Attention Neural Networks. Neurocomputing. Accepted.
• 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, AlesLeonardis, 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

• [2019 Fall]: How to do research (Half-day course, PhD Structured Development)
• [2019 Fall]: Database and Programming Fundamentals (DSA8002, MSc in Data Analytics)
• [2018 Fall]: How to do research (Half-day course, PhD Structured Development)
• [2018 Fall]: Database and Programming Fundamentals (DSA8002, MSc in Data Analytics)
• [2018 Spring]: How to do research (Half-day course, PhD Structured Development)
• [2017 Fall]: Database and Programming Fundamentals (DSA8002, MSc in Data Analytics)

Ph.D. Students

• Soumya Shubhra Ghosh (2017 - , EEECS, co-supervising with Prof. Robertson)
• Xinshao Wang (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)

Review

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 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, IJCAI, AAAI, BMVC

Invited Talks

• “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