Xinhua Zhuang Is IEEE Life Fellow and C.W. Lapierre Chair Professor, Computer Science At

BIOGRAPHY

Xinhua Zhuang is IEEE Life Fellow and C.W. LaPierre Chair Professor, Computer Science at University of Missouri. He had all his high education from Peking University, China. In earlier 1983, he was invited by Dr. R.M. Haralick the guru of digital image processing to work in the renowned Spatial Data Analysis Lab at Virginia Polytechnic and State University. Due to his extraordinary contribution to a space shuttle robot project of DoD, he was honored by NATO as AGARD Fellow in 1984. He was then invited as Guest Professor by Dr. T.S. Huang to lecture a graduate course “Computer Vision” at University of Illinois in 1985. He is one of few scholars, who became Full Professor at a major American school without earning a formal PhD in US.

Prof. Zhuang has done pioneering work in multidimensional signal processing, which has contributed to advancement of engineering, science and technology and has had substantial impacts in the area of image processing, image/video coding/communications, computer vision, pattern recognition, Internet search, etc.

He has introduced major extensions to the science and technology of the analysis and interpretation of image data, by being able to pose a variety of image analysis problems as optimization problems and then create efficient ways of solving these optimization problems. His contributions are substantial both in quantity and quality, and cover a wide range of areas, including maximum entropy image reconstruction, morphological image analysis, image sequence motion analysis, robust computer vision, pattern classifier design, neural networks, speech processing, image and video coding, video communications over IP, more recently Internet search engine design, etc.

His resume has over 270 solid publications (including 44 IEEE transaction papers). However, more important is that each of innovative approaches of his did more than solve a particular problem in image analysis. Each brought a broader understanding for the nature of the underlying optimization problem and its computationally efficient solution that itself became valuable in other kinds of problems.

He is the main contributor to the shape-based digital morphological sampling theorem complimentary to the frequency-based Nyquist sampling theorem. He derived the elegant close-forms to replace clumsy umbra forms for basic grayscale morphological image operations, i.e., erosion, dilation, opening, and closing in grayscale images; these close-forms have been world-wide popularly used by image processing scientists and engineers. He developed highly robust estimator that had been successfully used for tracking hurricane-eye movement based on the use of multiple satellite images. He developed the-state-of-the-art wavelet image coding technology SLCCA and IP videoconferencing system VCLAN. SLCCA outperforms JPEG 2000 by 1~1.5 dB in PSNR at low bit rate. VCLAN uses innovative object-of-interest coding that fully enables lip-reading, crystal hands/fingers movements and sign language. He developed virtual web to speed up PageRank calculation by 30%. Earlier in 80’s, he invented the world first Fetal ECG machine, which has been commercialized and most popularly used in China.

He has been active in professional societies such as IEEE and IAPR. He demonstrated his strong leadership in organizing large international conferences, including MMSP02 in US Virgin Island, MMSP05 in Shanghai, ICME04 in Taipei, ICME07 in Beijing, etc. Over years he has received various awards as well as a substantial amount of research funding from governments and private sectors in US and China.