The No. 89 lecture of Tsinghua Information Forum was successfully held in the lecture hall of FIT building on July 4, 2012. Prof. Shih-Fu Chang, from Columbia University was invited by Prof. Shiqiang Yang to present his current research work. The topic is “Large-Scale Mobile Visual Search”. Visual search on mobile device is the hottest and the most important research topic in the computer vision and multimedia area.

Prof. Shih-Fu Chang presented a deep technical review of his recent research activities with object recognition and feature description with very few bits. He describes some solutions in addressing such challenges, and demonstrates a large mobile product search system capable of searching one million product images in near real time. The advanced Hash based indexing algorithm is better than classic solution and is high efficient for implement in mobile devices. Finally, Prof. Shih-Fu Chang present a demo system, called Active Query Sensing, which aims at more intuitive mobile visual search experience. It uses visual analysis to discover the best view angle and guides user to capture best queries for location recognition. More than 70 faculty members and students from THU, PKU, ICT and Intel research lab attended this lecture.

Prof. Shih-Fu Chang is the Richard Dicker Professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Director of Digital Video and Multimedia Lab at Columbia University. His research focuses on multimedia retrieval, signal processing, computer vision, and machine learning. His group has developed several well-known content-based visual search systems and demonstrated leading performance in international video retrieval competitions. Recently, he has extended efforts to mobile computing and brain machine interfaces for multimedia applications. With more than 400 papers and 20 patents, he has been recognized with ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, IBM Faculty Award, and several best paper awards. He is an IEEE Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He served as Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2006-8), and Chairman of Columbia's Electrical Engineering Department (2007-2010).