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Chris Wei ZHOU

Assistant Professor in Intelligent Visual Computing, PhD, BEng, IEEE Senior Member

Associate Editor of IEEE TNNLS, Pattern Recognition, Neurocomputing

Exceptional Talent Endorsed by Royal Society

Visual Computing Research Group

British Standards Institution

Email: zhouw26 [at] cardiff [dot] ac [dot] uk

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Biography

I have been an Assistant Professor (UK Lecturer) in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University, United Kingdom since 2023. I am a member of Visual Computing Research Group, which is led by Prof. Paul Rosin. I am also a committee member of British Standards Institution and EPSRC Peer Review College. I serve as Chair for the Elections Committee of IEEE UK and Ireland SPS Chapter. I am a Senior Member of IEEE (2024, previously Member 2021, Student Member 2019). I was named in the 2024 edition of the Stanford University list of World Top 2% Scientists.

I was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. Before moving to UK, I studied and worked in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Waterloo, Canada under the supervision of Prof. Zhou Wang (FIEEE, FRSC, FCAE, Canada Research Chair) from 2019 to 2023. During the period, I received my PhD degree in 2021, with outstanding thesis award. I used to be a visiting professor at Dalian University of Technology (2024), a visiting scholar at Japan National Institute of Informatics (2017), a research assistant with Intel (2016-2018), a research intern in Microsoft Research (2018, with excellent award) and Alibaba Cloud (2019, with outstanding award). I had an educational background in Electrical Engineering at University of Science and Technology of China, under the supervision of Prof. Zhibo Chen and Prof. Weiping Li (Life Fellow of IEEE, Dean, Served as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE TCSVT).

My research interests mainly focus on image/video processing, multimedia computing, applied perception, human-centric AI, computational photography, imaging, vision, displays, and machine learning. I aim to develop efficient and intelligent visual processing algorithms based on human perception, helping improve the quality of experience for human visual systems. I received IEEE CASS VSPC Rising Star Honorable Mention Award (the first recipient in IQA research field worldwide) in 2024, ACM SIGMM Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (China Section, 1st nationwide) in 2022, and Grand Challenge Winner Award (1st place) in CVPR CLIC 2021.

Representative Publications

Image Processing:
• Tensor Oriented No-Reference Light Field Image Quality Assessment
  Wei Zhou, Likun Shi, Zhibo Chen, Jinglin Zhang
  IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2020 | [The first work explores tensor theory for evaluating light field image quality]
• Dual-Stream Interactive Networks for No-Reference Stereoscopic Image Quality Assessment
  Wei Zhou, Zhibo Chen, Weiping Li
  IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2019 | [The first deep learning-based stereoscopic image quality prediction work considers the hierarchical dual-stream interactive nature of the human visual system]
• Blind Stereoscopic Video Quality Assessment: From Depth Perception to Overall Experience
  Zhibo Chen, Wei Zhou^#, Weiping Li
  IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2018 | [The first attempt combines depth perception and overall experience in stereoscopic vision]
• Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment: Integrating Local Statistics and Global Semantics
  Wei Zhou, Zhou Wang
  IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 2023
Video Technology:
• Perceptual Depth Quality Assessment of Stereoscopic Omnidirectional Images
  Wei Zhou, Zhou Wang
  IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2024 | [The first perceptual depth quality measure for stereoscopic VR]
• No-Reference Quality Assessment for 360-degree Images by Analysis of Multifrequency Information and Local-global Naturalness
  Wei Zhou, Jiahua Xu, Qiuping Jiang, Zhibo Chen
  IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2022 | [The first natural scene statistics algorithm for VR quality assessment]
• Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment with Viewport Oriented Graph Convolutional Networks
  Jiahua Xu^*, Wei Zhou^*, Zhibo Chen
  IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2021 | [The first framework that based on graph networks for predicting the perceptual quality of VR images]
• No-Reference Light Field Image Quality Assessment Based on Spatial-Angular Measurement
  Likun Shi^*, Wei Zhou^*, Zhibo Chen, Jinglin Zhang
  IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2019 | [The first no-reference metric for evaluating the perceptual quality of light field images]
• Deep Multi-Scale Features Learning for Distorted Image Quality Assessment
  Wei Zhou, Zhibo Chen
  IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, 2021
• Deep Local and Global Spatiotemporal Feature Aggregation for Blind Video Quality Assessment
  Wei Zhou, Zhibo Chen
  IEEE International Conference on Visual Communications and Image Processing, 2020
Multimedia Computing:
• Blind Quality Assessment of Dense 3D Point Clouds with Structure Guided Resampling
  Wei Zhou, Qi Yang, Wu Chen, Qiuping Jiang, Guangtao Zhai, Weisi Lin
  ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 2024 | [The useful tool to evaluate the perceptual quality of point clouds without reference]
• LIQA: Lifelong Blind Image Quality Assessment
  Jianzhao Liu^*, Wei Zhou^*, Xin Li, Jiahua Xu, Zhibo Chen
  IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2022 | [The first lifelong learning-based work in IQA field] | (ESI Highly Cited Paper)
• Quality Assessment of Image Super-Resolution: Balancing Deterministic and Statistical Fidelity
  Wei Zhou, Zhou Wang
  ACM International Conference on Multimedia, 2022 | [The first work looks at the reconstructed quality of image super-resolution in a 2D fidelity space]
• Adaptive Hypergraph Convolutional Network for No-Reference 360-degree Image Quality Assessment
  Jun Fu, Chen Hou, Wei Zhou^#, Jiahua Xu, Zhibo Chen^#
  ACM International Conference on Multimedia, 2022 | [The first hypergraph-based VR quality evaluation framework]
• Image Super-Resolution Quality Assessment: Structural Fidelity Versus Statistical Naturalness
  Wei Zhou, Zhou Wang, Zhibo Chen
  IEEE International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience, 2021 | (Invited paper)
• Stereoscopic Video Quality Prediction Based on End-to-End Dual Stream Deep Neural Networks
  Wei Zhou, Zhibo Chen, Weiping Li
  Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia, 2018
Signal Processing and Applications:
• Dehazed Image Quality Evaluation: From Partial Discrepancy to Blind Perception
  Wei Zhou, Ruizeng Zhang, Leida Li, Guanghui Yue, Jianwei Gong, Huiyan Chen, Hantao Liu
  IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, 2024 | [The first RR/NR metric for dehazed images, testing on synthetic, real-world, and automotive imagery data, and can be applied to image dehazing]
• Vision-Language Consistency Guided Multi-modal Prompt Learning for Blind AI Generated Image Quality Assessment
  Jun Fu, Wei Zhou^#, Qiuping Jiang, Hantao Liu, Guangtao Zhai
  IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 2024 | [The first CLIP-based model for AIGC quality evaluation]
• Reduced-Reference Quality Assessment of Point Clouds via Content-Oriented Saliency Projection
  Wei Zhou, Guanghui Yue, Ruizeng Zhang, Yipeng Qin, Hantao Liu
  IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 2023 | [The first image-based RR metric for 3D point clouds]

Academic Leadership

• (2024-) Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
• (2024-) Associate Editor, Pattern Recognition (Elsevier)
• (2024-) Associate Editor, Neurocomputing (Elsevier)
• (2023-) Associate Editor, Signal, Image and Video Processing (Springer)
• (2025) Area Chair, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo
• (2025) Area Chair, IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks
• (2024) Area Chair, ACM International Conference on Multimedia

Selected Awards

• 2024 Top 2% Scientists Worldwide, Stanford University (斯坦福大学全球前2%顶尖科学家榜单)
• 2024 Journal of Electronics & Information Technology Outstanding Reviewer Award
• 2024 Digileader by Digital Futures, Sweden
• 2024 Interdisciplinary Research Sandpit from British Academy, Travel Grant
• 2024 IEEE CASS VSPC Rising Star Honorable Mention Award (IEEE电路系统学会视觉信号处理与通信新星荣誉奖，图像质量评价领域全球首位)
• 2023 Journal of Electronics & Information Technology Outstanding Reviewer Award
• 2023 Winner of the Sensors Annually Outstanding Reviewer Award
• 2022 ACM SIGMM China Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, 1st nationwide (ACM SIGMM优秀博士学位论文全国第一)
• 2022 Finalist of Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• 2022 MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship, Travel Grant from University of Nantes, France
• 2021 Grand Challenge Winner Award for IEEE CVPR CLIC Perceptual Metric Track, 1st place (CVPR基于学习的图像压缩挑战赛感知准则赛道冠军)
• 2021 IEEE VCIP Best Reviewer Award (VCIP最佳审稿人)
• 2021 President Award, Chinese Academy of Sciences (中国科学院院长奖)
• 2020 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Funding of USTC
• 2020 National Scholarship from USTC
• 2019 Outstanding Research Intern of Alibaba Group
• 2018 Microsoft Research STAR of Tomorrow Excellence Award
• 2017 NII International Internship Funding Support, Japan
• 2016 Provincial Outstanding Bachelor Thesis Award

LION Lab

I direct the InteLligent multImedia perceptiOn and generatioN (LION) research lab. My lab focuses on studying different perceptual and generative models in the intelligent multimedia field. Our lab is always looking for talented and self-motivated students.

Each year, our School has a number of funding schemes to support PhD research (School Studentships). Chinese PhD applicants are also welcome to apply via Cardiff University-China Scholarship Council joint-funded PhD Scholarship. If you are interested in working with me on cutting-edge image processing/multimedia research, please drop me an email.

Cardiff University (top 1 university in Wales, part of the Russell Group) is ranked top 2 (CSRankings) across the UK in the areas of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Natural Language Processing. I have worked with 30 students and extensively collaborated with researchers in both academia and industry worldwide. I will actively recommend my students for internships (Google, Meta, Intel, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba, etc.) and help them establish networking.