Zhu Li's Homepage at EECS@Northwestern


About me:

I am now Senior Staff Researcher and Media Analytics Reseach Group Lead at the Core Networks Research, FutureWei (Huawei) Technology , Bridgewater, New Jersey, USA, conducting research in video analytics, web scale video fingerprint and identification, Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (CDVS) for MPEG, as well as wireless video communication, network measurement, tomography and cache/bandwidth management optimization in Content Delivery Networks (CDN).

I was an Asst. Prof. with the Dept of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, from 2008~2010. Before that I was with the Multimedia Research Lab, Motorola Labs , USA, from 2000~2008, where I was a Principal Staff Research Engineer. I received my PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, USA, in 2004.

I am an IEEE Senior Member, elected Vice Chair for IEEE Multimedia Communication Tech Committee (MMTC), and my recent awards include a Best Poster Paper Award from IEEE International Conf on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), 2006, Toronto, and Best Paper Award from IEEE International Conf on Image Processing (ICIP), 2007.

For more info: my Bio, CV,, and old webpage .


New: The First Huawei Workshop on Multimedia Processing & Cloud Computing

Teaching at HK PolyU:
Spring 2010, COMP435 Biometrics & Security
Spring 2010, COMP 6817 Adv Networking: Optimization in Communication & Networking
Fall 2009, COMP100 Intro to Info Tech
Spring, 2009, COMP435 Biometrics & Security
Fall 2008, COMP212 Computer Architecture


Research Summary:

My research interests are in:
1) Signal/Image Analysis and Machine Learning : image/video analytics, audio processing, machine leanring and their applications in image/video/music search and mining, video action and event recognition,
2) Large Scale Multimedia Search and Mining : subspace indexing on Grassmann manifold, Grassmann hashing, large scale video repository duplicate detection, search by sing-along over large scale music respository (over 1.5 million songs), location and product search via image repository mining.
Please check out our mobile product search-by-capture demo
3) Next Gen Video Networking : space-time coding for providing embedded channels for scalable video broadcasting, joint fountain and layered video coding, spatio-temporal video quality metric for scalable video modeling, network optimization and distributed resource coordinating in video over mutli-access, broadcasting and mesh networks. Recently edited Springer-Verlag book (with Changwen Chen and Shiguo Lian) Intelligent Video Communication: Techniques and Applications

Exciting recent results in large repository video duplicate detection, achieving 98% precision on 100% recall for a wide range of query corruptions, having duplicate localization within 120 frames in sequence, while having a response time of 0.003 sec for an 120 hour repository. We will demonstrate that we can achieve the same performance for 10,000 hour video within 0.1 sec. see my recent talk (slides) at MSRA for more detail.

My research projects are currently supported by grants from Microsoft Research Asia, Hong Kong RGC/GRF, and PolyU, which are graciously acknowledged here.

Call for special issue papers: Subspace and Manifold Learning for Image/Video Indexing and Search, Y. Fu, Z. Li, X. Hua, T.S. Huang and A. K. Katsaggelos IEEE Trans on System, Man & Cybernetics B, 2010.

Research Group

Post-Doc/PhD/Research Assistant Recruiting: support is available for motivated students in areas of video analysis, video search and mining, video communication and networking. Please see my related research projects for more detail. See the current opening for more detail. Also there is a Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Program for outstanding candidates.

Some highlights of recent projects and selected publications (book chapters/journal papers and submissions in purple):

Multimedia Computing:

Currently I am interested in spatio-temporal appearance modeling, piece-wise linear approximation of non-linear appearance manifolds, with query driven and/or global structures, and their applications in multimedia computing problems.

[1] Visual Pattern Recognition and Biometrics: appearance manifold modeling, local embeddings, diffusions, model localization with piece-wise linear model approximation of a global non-linear manifold, with application in face recognition, head-pose estimation and video search metrics. [2] Image/Video Search and Mining : repeated clip search and mining with the LUminance Field Trajectory (LUFT) modeling, scalability in searching large video repositories, SIFT based image similarity search. Our LUFT based repated video clip searching achieves very high performance in speed (0.012sec to search an 5-hour collection) and precision-recall (100% vs 96%), see a report,

Multimedia Communication:

Adances in video signal processing and coding give us a rich set of video coding and adaptation tools with associated quality metrics, how to utilize these tools and metrics, and integrate with underlying network engineering elements like channel and network coding, routing and resource allocation and optimization solutions, developing a distributed, scalable and adaptive content delivery network solution, are my interests.

[1] Internet Video Delivery: utility gradient driven scheduling, P2P, content-aware, source-channel coding, elasticity and R-D optimization

[2] Multi-Access Multimedia Networking: pricing model on resource allocation, distributed coordination for outer loop control, while source coding/adaptation R-D optimization in the inner loop:

[3] Wireless Video: video source adaptation, cross-layer optimization, source-channel coding, resource allocation and collaboration, local relays, wireless P2P, energy efficiency.

[4] Video Summarization & VLBR Video Streaming: Frame drop distortion metrics, Viterbi algorithm based frame drop optimization to minimize frame drop distortions, with applications in VLBR video streaming (e.g. QCIF "foreman" sequence streaming at 18kbps, demo available on request).
updated: 10/10/2009, by Z. Li.