Dr. Ren Yang

Ren Yang, Dr. sc. ETH Zürich

Senior Researcher
Media Computing Group, Microsoft Research Asia

Email: yangren@microsoft.com (work), ren.yang@alumni.ethz.ch (personal)

[Google Scholar] [Homepage @ Microsoft Research] [Github] [LinkedIn]

Biography

I join Microsoft as a Senior Researcher at the Media Computing Group, after half-year experience of Senior Algorithm Researcher at SenseTime. I obtained the degree of Doktor der Wissenschaften (Dr. sc. ETH Zürich) at the Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zürich, Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Luc Van Gool and Prof. Dr. Radu Timofte, and received the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad. During my doctoral studies, I also worked as a Ph.D. researcher at Toyota Research on Automated Cars in Europe (TRACE). Before that, I was a Research Intern (with Award of Excellence) at the Intelligent Multimedia Group, Microsoft Research Asia. I obtained the M.Sc. degree in 2019 at Beihang University, P.R. China, and the B.Sc. degree at the same university in 2016. My Master Thesis is awarded the Winner of Three Minute Thesis Competition at IEEE ICME 2019, and the Outstanding Master Thesis of Chinese Institute of Electronics.

I am a Session Chair at IJCAI 2022, a Senior Program Committee (SPC) Member at IJCAI 2021, a co-organizer of NTIRE 2024 (CVPR), NTIRE 2023 (CVPR), AIM 2022 (ECCV), NTIRE 2022 (CVPR) and NITRE 2021 (CVPR) Workshops, a co-organizer/speaker of Tutorials on Neural Codec at ACM MM 2021, CVPR 2021 and VCIP 2020.

News

One paper is accepted to CVPR 2024 (Highlight). [Paper] [Code]
We organize the 9th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2024. [Challenge report]
I receive the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad (10,000 USD).
One paper is accepted to IEEE T-CSVT. [Paper] [Code]
We organize the 8th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2023.
One paper is accepted to IEEE T-CSVT. [Paper] [Code]
I serve as a Session Chair at the Computer Vision Session of IJCAI 2022.
One paper is accepted to ECCV 2022. [Paper] [Code]
We organize the 4th AIM workshop in ECCV 2022. [Challenge report]
One paper is accepted to IJCAI 2022 (Oral). [Paper] [Code]
We organize the 7th NTIRE workshop in CVPR 2022. [Challenge report]
I co-supervise a Master's Thesis on learned image compression at ETH Zurich. [Paper] [Code]
We organize the Tutorial on Neural Codec at ACM MM 2021. [Tutorial page]
I am invitated as a Guest Speaker for the Tutorial on Neural Codec at CVPR 2021. [Slides]
We organize the 6th NTIRE workshop in CVPR 2021. [Dataset] [Challenge report]
I am selected in the Finalist of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Europe 2021.
One paper is accepted to CVPR 2021 (Oral). [Paper] [Code]
Our US Patent for multi-frame video enhancement has been Granted. [Google Patent]
I serve as a Senior Program Committee (SPC) member for IJCAI 2021. [Certificate]
One paper is accepted to IEEE J-STSP. [Paper] [Code]
We organize the Tutorial on Neural Codec at IEEE VCIP 2020. [Abstract] [Slide] [Video record]
One paper is accepted to CVPR 2020. [Paper] [Code]
One paper is accepted to IEEE T-IP. [Paper] [Code] [Dataset]
I am a recipient of 2019 Outstanding Master Thesis of Chinese Institute of Elecronics. [Certificate]
One paper is accepted to ICCV 2019 (Oral). [Paper] [Code]
One paper is accepted to IEEE T-PAMI. [Paper] [Code]
I am the Winner of Three Minute Thesis Competition at IEEE ICME 2019. [Certificate]

Selected Publications

(*: Intern under my mentorship †: Corresponding author)

	Boosting Neural Representations for Videos with a Conditional Decoder Xinjie Zhang, Ren Yang†, Dailan He, Xingtong Ge, Tongda Xu, Yan Wang, Hongwei Qin, Jun Zhang†. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024. (Highlight)* [Paper] [Code]
	NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Blind Enhancement of Compressed Image Ren Yang and Radu Timofte. This challenge is a part of the NTIRE workshop in conjunction with CVPR 2024. [Report]
	Advancing Learned Video Compression with In-loop Frame Prediction Ren Yang, Radu Timofte and Luc Van Gool. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (T-CSVT), 2023. [Paper] [Code]
	MASIC: Deep Mask Stereo Image Compression Xin Deng, Yufan Deng, Ren Yang, Wenzhe Yang, Radu Timofte and Mai Xu. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (T-CSVT), 2023. [Paper] [Code]
	Implicit Neural Representations for Image Compression Yannick Strümpler, Janis Postels, Ren Yang, Luc van Gool and Federico Tombari. European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022. [Paper] [Code]
	AIM 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video Ren Yang and Radu Timofte. This challenge is a part of the AIM workshop in conjunction with ECCV 2022. [Homepage] [Report]
	Perceptual Learned Video Compression with Recurrent Conditional GAN Ren Yang, Radu Timofte and Luc Van Gool. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2022. (Oral) [Paper] [Code]
	NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution and Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video Ren Yang and Radu Timofte. This challenge is a part of the NTIRE workshop in conjunction with CVPR 2022. [Homepage] [Report]
	NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video Ren Yang and Radu Timofte. This challenge is a part of the NTIRE workshop in conjunction with CVPR 2021. [Homepage] [Dataset report] [Methods report]
	Deep Homography for Efficient Stereo Image Compression Xin Deng, Wenzhe Yang, Ren Yang, Mai Xu, Enpeng Liu, Qianhan Feng and Radu Timofte. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021. (Oral) [Paper] [Code]
	Learning for Video Compression with Recurrent Auto-Encoder and Recurrent Probability Model Ren Yang, Fabian Mentzer, Luc Van Gool and Radu Timofte. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (J-STSP), 2021. [Paper] [Code]
	Learning to Improve Image Compression without Changing the Standard Decoder Yannick Strümpler, Ren Yang and Radu Timofte. European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ECCVW), 2020. [Paper] [Code]
	Learning for Video Compression with Hierarchical Quality and Recurrent Enhancement Ren Yang, Fabian Mentzer, Luc Van Gool and Radu Timofte. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020. [Paper] [Code]
	Understanding and Predicting the Memorability of Outdoor Natural Scenes Jiaxin Lu, Mai Xu, Ren Yang and Zulin Wang. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP), 2020. [Paper] [Code] [Dataset] [Conference paper (EE-USAD 2018) (Oral)]
	Wavelet Domain Style Transfer for an Effective Perception-distortion Tradeoff in Single Image Super-Resolution Xin Deng, Ren Yang, Mai Xu and Pier Luigi Dragotti. IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019. (Oral) [Paper] [Code]
	Quality-Gated Convolutional LSTM for Enhancing Compressed Video Ren Yang, Xiaoyan Sun, Mai Xu and Wenjun Zeng. IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2019. (Oral) [Paper] [Code]
	MFQE 2.0: A New Approach for Multi-frame Quality Enhancement on Compressed Video Zhengyu Guan, Qunliang Xing, Mai Xu, Ren Yang, Tie Liu and Zulin Wang. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2019. [Paper] [Code]
	A Deep Learning Approach for Multi-Frame In-Loop Filter of HEVC Tianyi Li, Mai Xu, Ce Zhu, Ren Yang, Zulin Wang and Zhenyu Guan. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP), 2019. [Paper] [Code] [Conference paper (DCC 2019) (Oral)]
	Multi-Frame Quality Enhancement for Compressed Video Ren Yang, Mai Xu, Zulin Wang and Tianyi Li. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018. [Paper] [Code]
	Reducing Complexity of HEVC: A Deep Learning Approach Mai Xu, Tianyi Li, Zulin Wang, Xin Deng, Ren Yang and Zhenyu Guan. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP), 2018. [Paper] [Code]
	Enhancing Quality for HEVC Compressed Videos Ren Yang, Mai Xu, Tie Liu, Zulin Wang and Zhenyu Guan. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (T-CSVT), 2018. [Paper] [Conference paper (ICME 2017) (Oral)]
	Saliency-Guided Complexity Control for HEVC Decoding Ren Yang, Mai Xu, Zulin Wang, Yiping Duan and Xiaoming Tao. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting (T-BC), 2018. [Paper] [Conference paper (ICME 2016)]

Patents

Multi-frame quality enhancement method and device for lossy compressed video
WO2019154152A1 [Google Patent]
US10965959B2, 2021 [Google Patent] [Certificate]
CN108307193B, 2018 [Google Patent] [Certificate]
Software copyright, 2020SR0472737, 2020 [Certificate]

Deep learning method-based block segmentation coding complexity optimization method and device
WO2019179523A1 [Google Patent]
CN108495129B, 2019 [Google Patent] [Certificate]

A CNN-based method for image and video enhancement
CN107481209B, 2020 [Google Patent] [Certificate]

A saliency-guided method for complexity control of HEVC decoding
CN106210717B, 2017 [Google Patent] [Certificate]

Awards

Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad (10,000 USD). [Certificate]
Winner of Three Minute Thesis Competition, IEEE ICME 2019. [Certificate]
2019 Outstanding Master Thesis Award of Chinese Institute of Elecronics. [News] [Certificate]
Award of Excellence at Microsoft Research. [Certificate]
TOP 10 Graduate Students Award, Beihang University. [Certificate]
National Scholarship, P.R. China. [Certificate]

Tutorials

ACM MM 2021: Deep Learning for Visual Data Compression.
CVPR 2021: Deep Learning for Visual Data Compression. [Tutorial homepage]
IEEE VCIP 2020: Learned Image and Video Compression with Deep Neural Networks. [Abstract] [Slide] [Video record]

Workshops

Co-organizer of the 9th New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop (CVPR 2024).
- Organizer of the NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Blind Compressed Image Enhancement [Report]
Co-organizer of the 8th New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop (CVPR 2023).
Co-organizer of the 4th Advances in Image Manipulation (AIM) workshop (ECCV 2022).
- Organizer of the AIM 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video [Report]
Co-organizer of the 7th New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop (CVPR 2022).
- Organizer of the NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution and Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video [Report]
Co-organizer of the 6th New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop (CVPR 2021).
- Organizer of the NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video [Dataset] [Methods]

Services

Session Chair:

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2022) [Program]

Senior Program Commitee (SPC) Member:

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021) [Certificate]

Journal Reviewer:

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI)
International Journal on Computer Vision (IJCV)
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP)
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (J-STSP)
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (T-MM)
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (T-CSVT)
IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (T-ETCI)
IEEE Open Journal of Circuits and Systems (OJ-CAS)
IEEE Signal Processing Letters (SPL)
IEEE Access
Elsevier's Signal Processing: Image Communication
Elsevier's Neurocomputing
Hindawi's Advances in Multimedia

Conference Reviewer/Program Commitee (PC) Member:

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2021/2022/2023/2024/2025)
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021/2023)
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2020/2022/2024)
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022)
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022/2023)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023/2024)
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2022/2023/2025)
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021/2022/2024)
Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV 2020)
IEEE Visual Communications and Image Processing (VCIP 2021/2022)
IEEE/CIC International Conference on Communications in China (ICCC 2018)

Teaching and Supervision

Supervisor: Master's Thesis on learned image compression, ETH Zurich (Spring 2021)
Supervisor: Master's Semester Project on learned image compression, ETH Zurich (Spring 2020)
Teaching Assistant: Digital Image Processing, Beihang University (Spring 2017)