Cong Yang

I am an Associate Professor at the School of Future Science and Engineering at Soochow University (SUDA), where I am heading the Ecology and Innovation Center of Intelligent Driving (BeeLab). My work is in the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and autonomous driving, with the goal of making autonomous driving system more robust, reliable and safe in various environments.

I was a Postdoc researcher at the MAGRIT team in INRIA (France). Later, I worked scientifically on computer vision and machine learning in Clobotics and Horizon Robotics. At Clobotics, I have worked on Smart Retail and Smart Wind with Dr. Yan Ke. At Horizon Robotics, I led the computer vision team and successfully delivered the intelligent cockpit (Changan UNI-T) based on Journey 2 SoC, making UNI-T the world's first massive-produced car using Chinese AI chips. I did my Ph.D. degree in computer vision and pattern recognition from the University of Siegen (Germany) in 2016, supervised by Prof. Dr. Marcin Grzegorzek.

Email  /  CV  /  Bio  /  Google Scholar  /  Chinese Page  /  Github

profile photo
Research

My research interests include skeleton extraction in images and shapes, image stitching, absolute and relative camera pose estimation, moire pattern detection and removal, fine-grained object classification, and vision-related perceptions in autonomous driving. My current work focuses on making algorithms on resource-limited SoC for environmental perception in autonomous driving scenarios.

News

Publications

For an up-to-date list of my publications, please see my Google Scholar profile.

Teaching

Lectures

  • 2024-Winter: Computer Vision, Soochow University
  • 2024-Winter: Machine Learning, Soochow University
  • 2023-Winter: Computer Vision, Soochow University
  • 2023-Summer: Computer Vision Practice, Soochow University
  • 2023-Summer: Data Structure, Soochow University
  • 2023-Summer: Data Structure Practice, Soochow University

Theses

  • 2023:
    Shiyuan Chen: Towards Robust Vehicle and Pedestrian Detection via Monocular Camera, Tianjin Polytechnic University
  • 2018:
    Oliver Tiebe: Automatic Skeleton Pruning for Graph-based Object Retrieval, University of Siegen
Datasets and Codes
clean-usnob A Vision-Centric Approach for Static Map Element Annotation
Jiaxin Zhang, Chen Shiyuan, Haoran Yin, Ruohong Mei, Xuan Liu, Cong Yang(*) and Wei Sui
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024, pp 1-7.
paper / video-YouTube / video-Bilibili / codes-GitHub

CAMA: Consistent and Accurate Map Annotation for Intelligent Driving.

In use at Horizon Robotics for 4D annotation

clean-usnob RoMe: Towards Large Scale Road Surface Reconstruction via Mesh Representation
Ruohong Mei, Wei Sui, Jiaxin Zhang, Qian Zhang, Tao Peng, Cong Yang(*)
arXiv, 2306.11368, 2023, pp 1-7.
paper / video-YouTube / video-Bilibili / codes

A simple yet efficient method, RoMe, for largescale Road surface reconstruction via Mesh representations.

In use at Horizon Robotics for 4D annotation

clean-usnob Doing More With Moiré Pattern Detection in Digital Photos
Cong Yang, Zhenyu Yang, Yan Ke, Tao Chen, Marcin Grzegorzek, John See
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 32, 2023, pp 694-708.
paper / video / codes / datasets

MoireDet algorothm for real-time Moiré Pattern Detection.

MoireScape dataset for training and evaluating moiré pattern detection and removal.

In use at Clobotics Smart Retail

clean-usnob FatigueView: A Multi-Camera Video Dataset for Vision-based Drowsiness Detection
Cong Yang, Zhenyu Yang, Weiyu Li, John See
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 24, 2023, pp 233-246.
paper / project page / codes / datasets

FatigueView is a new large-scale dataset for vision-based drowsiness detection, which is constructed for the research community towards closing the data gap behind the industry.

In use at Changan UNI-T

clean-usnob Towards Accurate Image Stitching for Drone-based Wind Turbine Blade Inspection
Cong Yang, Xun Liu, Hua Zhou, Yan Ke, John See
Renewable Energy, 203, 2023, pp 267-279.
paper / datasets

Blade30 contains 1,302 real drone-captured images covering 30 full blades captured under various conditions (both on- and off-shore), accompanied by a rich set of annotations such as defects and contaminations, etc.

In use at Clobotics Smart Wind

clean-usnob BlumNet: Graph Component Detection for Object Skeleton Extraction
Yulu Zhang, Liang Sang, Marcin Grzegorzek, John See, Cong Yang(*)
ACM International Conference on Multimedia, 2022, pp 5527–5536.
paper / video / codes

BlumNet is a simple yet efficient framework for extracting object skeletons in natural images and binary shapes. BlumNet has significantly higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art AdaLSN (0.826 vs. 0.786) on the SK1491 dataset, a marked improvement in robustness on mixed object deformations, and also a state-of-the-art performance on binary shape datasets (e.g. 0.893 on the MPEG7 dataset).

clean-usnob SiTPose: A Siamese Convolutional Transformer for Relative Camera Pose Estimation
Kai Leng, Cong Yang(*), Wei Sui, Jie Liu, Zhijun Li (*)
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2023.
paper / codes

SiTPose is a siamese convolutional transformer model to regress relative camera pose directly.

clean-usnob Towards Accurate Ground Plane Normal Estimation from Ego-Motion
Jiaxin Zhang, Wei Sui, Qian Zhang, Tao Chen, Cong Yang(*)
Sensors, 2022, 22(23), pp 9375.
arXiv / codes

It uses odometry as input and estimates accurate ground plane normal vectors in real time.

In use at Horizon Driving Solutions

clean-usnob PIoU Loss: Towards Accurate Oriented Object Detection in Complex Environments
Zhiming Chen, Kean Chen, Weiyao Lin(*), John See, Hui Yu, Yan Ke, Cong Yang(*)
European Conference on Computer Vision, 2020, pp 195-211.
paper / codes

Pixels-IoU (PIoU) Loss is formulated to exploit both the angle and IoU for accurate oriented bounding box (OBB) regression.

In use at Clobotics Smart Retail

clean-usnob Retail50K dataset

Retail50K is a collection of 47,000 images from different supermarkets. Annotations on those images are the layer edges of shelves, fridges and displays, for training and evaluating oriented bounding box (OBB) detectors.

datasets download
clean-usnob WatchPose: A View-Aware Approach for Camera Pose Data Collection in Industrial Environments
Cong Yang, Gilles Simon, John See, Marie-Odile Berger, Wenyong Wang
Sensors, 2020, 20(11), pp 3045.
paper / video / codes / Industrial10 Dataset

WatchPose is a simple yet efficient camera pose data collection method to improve the generalization and robustness of camera pose regression models.

clean-usnob Evaluating Contour Segment Descriptors
Cong Yang, Oliver Tiebe, Kimiaki Shirahama, Ewa Łukasik, Marcin Grzegorzek
Machine Vision and Applications, 28, 2017, pp 373–391.
paper / codes
Datasets: ETHZ CS / MPEG7 CS-small / Sketching CS

Source codes of 17 contour segment (CS) descriptors and 4 CS datasets.

clean-usnob Stripes-based Object Matching
Oliver Tiebe, Cong Yang(*), Muhammad Hassan Khan, Marcin Grzegorzek, Dominik Scarpin
Computer and Information Science, 656, 2016, pp 59-72.
paper / codes

A 3D object matching framework based on stripes generated from laser scanning lines.

clean-usnob Object Shape Generation, Representation and Matching
Cong Yang Oliver Tiebe, Kimiaki Shirahama, Marcin Grzegorzek
Pattern Recognition, 55, 2016, pp 183-197.
Pattern Recognition Letters, 2016, pp 251-260.

project page:
Hierarchical Skeleton / High-order Matching

codes:
Skeleton Graph / Audio Skeleton / Shape Trend
clean-usnob Shape and Skeleton-related Codes and Datasets
Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2014, pp 95-110.
International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), 2015, pp 519-522.
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2014, pp 3374-3397.

codes: Skeleton Pruning / SubBox / DCE Method
datasets: MPEG400 Dataset / Tetrapod120 Dataset
clean-usnob SiDiff Shape: A search engine for 2D shape matching and retrieval
Cong Yang, Oliver Tiebe, Pit Pietsch, Christian Feinen, Udo Kelter, Marcin Grzegorzek
International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2014, pp 2202-2206.

paper / Source Code (Java) / Documents
clean-usnob Source code of KidPating painting tool
Cong Yang @ Imagine Cup 2010

slides / video / codes(C#) / hardware / users
clean-usnob Xmon: A Lightweight Multilayer Open Monitoring Tool for Large-scale Virtual Clusters
Cong Yang, Jue Hong, Cheng-Zhong Xu
paper / video / codes
Commissions of Trust

Editor:

  • Frontiers in Signal Processing: 2022

Program Committee:

  • International Workshop on Sensor-Based Activity Recognition and Artificial Intelligence: 2023

Workshop Chair:

  • International Conference on Cybernetics: 2017

Reviewer:

  • ACM Multimedia
  • IEEE International Conference on Image Processing
  • International Journal of Computer Vision
  • IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
  • IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
  • IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

This website is based on the source code of Jon Barron's website.