ProfJian Zhang

Current Research Focus and PhD Projects (2021)

I am recruiting new PhD students. The PhD candidate will be in a large research group and study computer vision, machine learning, AI based data analysis to develop advanced algorithms for problem solving. The PhD candidate will be supported by the supervisor team to publish high ranked journal and conference papers.

[1] A New PhD Project on Effective Cross-media Semantic Analysis and Retrieval from Heterogeneous Data Sources

This PhD project is to converge cutting-edge research in computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing.
The research objective is to build computation models that enables the web search will be capable of analysing the joint information on images, videos, and texts shared by heterogeneous multimedia data sources. Therefore, it will provide improved user experiences by making minimum efforts but obtain comprehensive information

[2] A New PhD Project on Remote Sensing and Modelling of Australian grasslands

This PhD project is to conduct cutting-edge research in sensing technology based on optical remote sensing and Lidar imaging data.

The research objective is to understand the correlation between remote sensing data and the complex processes occurring in grasslands related to climate change. Based on the results generated from computer vision technology, a data analysis model will be developed to estimate plant variables, e.g., greenness indices and biomass. Under the cross-disciplinary supervisor team, the PhD candidate will learn the research skills to analysis, modelling and processing of data from satellite image, Lidar and other sensing data sources to understand the physical origin of the features observed in the data. The PhD candidate will also collaborate with UTS plant physiology group to conduct his/her PhD study.

[3] Several PhD Projects in my UTS research group

3D Image Content Processing:
Research on 3D object segmentation and registration has recently made significant progress with high demands in application giving way to new emerging 3D sensors such as Lidar. Most recently, our research has focused on 1) extracting distinctive representations of 3D point clouds with or without limited manual annotations, 2) learning-based registration by leveraging the advantages of conventional mathematical theories and recent deep learning to accurately align the 3D data, and 3) exploiting the correlation among points or point blocks (also called “contexts”) to improve the performance of point cloud segmentation methods.

Fine-Grained Categorisation for Large-Scale Image Datasets:
Learning from large datasets for fine-grained recognition has attracted significant interest in the computer vision research community. Our research focuses on 1) web data supervised learning by building high-quality datasets, 2) feature alignment to reduce high intra-class variance, and 3) high-order feature extraction to enhance the discrimination of low inter-class variance in fine-grained object recognition.

Social Multimedia Signal Processing:
Combining multiple modalities (images and texts) to accomplish various social multimedia analysis tasks is attracting more attention, inspired by the fact that spreading and collecting multimodal data through the Internet has become the norm. Our recent research on this topic focuses on 1) multimodal fusion via supervised deep learning and 2) multimodal-based neural autoregression models.

PhD Scholarships:

I have two full PhD scholarships to fund high-profile PhD candidates in the following areas:

Image processing & pattern recognition
* 2D amp; 3D computer vision
* Video/image content analysis
* Data analytics and multimedia information retrieval
* Social multimedia signal processing
* Multimedia and new media Analytics

For international students, in addition to a stipend that covers living expenses, the International Research Scholarship also waives tuition fees. Please contact me for more details.

UTS Distinguished Visiting Scholars (DVS) Scheme (international)

Professor Jian Zhang has succeeded in the competitive selection process of the UTS DVS scheme to invite four world-renowned Professors or distinct researchers to UTS for a short period, including:

2012: Professor Dan Schonfeld, IEEE Fellow, from University of Illinois at Chicago. Previous Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Circuits & Systems for Video Technology
2013: Dr. Zhengyou Zhang, IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow, from Microsoft Research US. He is also a recipient of the 2013 Helmholtz Test of Time Award which was awarded to him by the International Conference on Computer Vision. He is a world-class researcher in computer vision
2017: Professor Jiebo Luo, IEEE Fellow, from University of Rochester. He was with Kodak Research for more than 15 years and is now a leading researcher in social multimedia research.
2018: Professor Ming Lin, IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow and an American Computer Scientist from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, Chair Professor and a world-class researcher in computer graphics.
More details: https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/future-research-staff/uts-distinguished-visiting-scholars-7

UTS Key Technology Partner (KTP) Scheme (international)

In 2015, Professor Jian Zhang succeeded in the competitive selection process of the UTS KTP scheme to invite two KTP visitors to UTS:

Professor Yao Lu from School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT)
Professor Ping An from School of Communication & Info. Engineering at Shanghai University.
Both professors brought their research experiences to UTS. It is with their help that we have recruited four dual-PhD students from BIT and SHU.

Invited KTP visitors through BIT/UTS and SHU/UTS schemes (international)

As a research leader, Jian was invited to be a KTP visitor at the Beijing Institute of Technology and Shanghai University in January 2015 and June 2015 respectively. This was in recognition of my collaboration with BIT and SHU.