A team led by Associate Professor Yang Zhixin from the State Key Laboratory of the Internet of Things for Smart City and the Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau (UM), and Wang Shizheng, a researcher from the School of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), recently won the second prize in the UG2+ Prize Challenge at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2019).

This year’s event attracted 260 research teams around the world, including artificial intelligence (AI) companies such as SenseTime, JingDong, Meitu Lab, and Hikivision. After the knockout stage, four research teams were left to compete for the final awards in a challenge titled ‘Object Classification on Video from Unconstrained Mobility Platforms’. The joint team formed by UM and CAS won the second prize of the competition for the performance of its research achievements based on the multidimensional test criteria. In addition, the team gave a speech titled ‘Selective Enhancement for Object Classification in Complicated Environment’. Members of UM in the team included PhD students Tang Lulu and Luo Luqing from UM’s State Key Laboratory of the Internet of Things for Smart City.

The UG2+ Prize Challenge was divided into two tracks, namely ‘Video Object Classification and Detection from Unconstrained Mobility Platforms’ and ‘Object Detection in Poor Visibility Environments’. Under the two tracks, there are five sub-challenges. The UM-CAS joint team joined a sub-challenge under the first track, titled ‘Object Classification Improvement on Video’. The challenge aimed to enhance the object classification accuracy on videos from unconstrained mobility platforms. The other awarded research teams included a team formed by the CAS and the Northeast University, as well as teams from Honeywell Intl, the Technical University of Munich, Sunway.AI: Joint Research Union, and Meitu Inc.

CVPR is one of the top three computer vision conferences in the world. The UG2+ Prize Challenge is co-organised by CVPR, related government departments, as well as academic and research companies in the field. The event aimed to evaluate and explore the accuracy and robustness of the most advanced computer vision algorithms for the tasks of object detection and classification in extreme conditions.