About me

I am postdoctoral fellow in Mérida Labs of University of British Columbia, I work on developing the digital twin of the UBC Smart Hydrogen Energy District (SHED) designed for smart and renewable energy technologies. I obtained my Ph.D. in computer science from the Immersive and Creative Technologies (ICT) lab at Concordia University, where I was advised by Dr. Charalambos Poullis on the project of DAEDALUS: Massive-scale Urban Reconstruction, Classification, and Rendering from Remote Sensor Imagery. Before, I received my M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Dr. Dirk Schnieders on the project of mobile augmented reality, and worked at HKU Advanced Robotics Initiative(My homepage) as research assistant. I had one year experience of full-time research associate in robot picking challenge at the HKU Mechanical Robotics lab with my supervisor Dr. James Lam. Now I am a computer vision researcher in sports streaming at Livebarn Inc. My current job is applied research on computer vision tasks in sports videos, e.g. player recognition, identification and tracking, player analysis, scoreboard recognition, lane and speed detection, and sports field detection, etc.

My main research interests lie in fundamental topics of image-based 3D reconstruction of large-scale urban areas. More broadly, I am interested in computer vision, computer graphics, structure-from-motion, (multi-view) stereo, localization, optimization, machine learning/deep learning, virtual/augmented reality and artificial intelligence. You can find my publications on Google Scholar.

Highlights

  • paper icon

    3D Reconstruction

    3D pointcloud

    Motion Estimation for Large Displacements and Deformations, Nature Scientific Reports 2022.

  • dev icon

    Player Analysis

    player tracking

    Ice hockey player tracking and identification.
    (Livebarn Inc.)

  • photo icon

    Local News

    player tracking

    Part of a long-term vision of automating the creation of digital twins as featured in Le Devoir.

  • dev icon

    Humanoid Robotics

    DARPA challenge

    HKU team in DARPA Robotics Challenge, June 5-6, 2015, California USA. (HKU page)

Resume

Experience

  1. Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia (UBC)

    2023 — Present

    - Co-lead projects in partnership with TransLink, BC Hydro and the Vancouver Economic Commission to develop strategies for public transit fleet decarbonization.
    - Developing the digital twin of the UBC Smart Hydrogen Energy District (SHED) designed for smart and renewable energy technologies.

  2. Computer Vision Specialist, Livebarn Inc.

    2021 — Present

    - Research work on computer vision tasks, e.g. player recognition, identification and tracking, player analysis, scoreboard recognition, lane and speed detection, and sports field detection.
    - Automated broadcast system for live streamimg

  3. Research Associate, The University of HongKong (HKU)

    2015 — 2016

    - Research topics on automatic picking novel objects with humanoid robots.
    - Machine learning/deep learning tasks of robot vision and robot kinematics optimization.

Education

  1. Concordia University

    Doctor of philosophy in Computer Science.

    - Doctoral Graduate Fellowships, Tuition Award of Excellence, Merit Scholarship
    - Thesis: Robust Methods for Accurate and Efficient Reconstruction from Motion Imagery
    - Member of The Immersive & Creative Technologies Lab, focusing on fundamental research in the areas of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and Virtual/Augmented Reality
    - Research topics of large-scale urban 3D reconstruction from 2D images
    - Teaching assistant of Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Python courses

  2. the University of Hong Kong

    Master of Science in Computer Science.

    - The Arthur and Louise May Memorial Fund Scholarship 2014-2015
    - DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, California, June 5-6 2015
    - Presentation in CASE 2015, Gothenburg, Sweden, August 24-27 2015
    - Dissertation: Platform-independent Mobile Augmented Reality
    - Member of HKU Advanced Robotics Laboratory, Designing and implementing technology and algorithms across different research topics, including Graphics, Vision, and Motion Planning
    - Major in Image and 3D data processing, computer vision, computational intelligence and augmented reality

  3. BSc in Software Engineering and BA in English Language and Literature

Skills

  • Computer Vision
    90%
  • Computer Graphics
    70%
  • Python
    70%
  • C/C++
    60%

Publications

  1. Tracking and Identification of Ice Hockey Players

    The 14th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (ICVS 2023)

    Qiao Chen, Charalambos Poullis
    [paper]

  2. Motion estimation for large displacements and deformations

    Journal: Nature Scientific Reports. November 2022

    Qiao Chen, Charalambos Poullis
    [paper]

  3. Single-shot Dense Reconstruction with EpicFlow

    Conference: 12th 3D True Vision: 3D at any scale and any perspective, 3DTV-CON, 2018

    Qiao Chen, Charalambos Poullis
    [paper]

  4. End-to-End Multi-View Structure-from-Motion with Hypercorrelation Volumes

    IEEE 3rd International Conference on Power, Electronics and Computer Applications (ICPECA), 2023

    Qiao Chen, Charalambos Poullis
    [paper]

  5. A Novel, Variable Stiffness Robotic Gripper Based on Integrated Soft Actuating and Particle Jamming

    Journal: Soft Robotics, Volume 3 pp 134--143, 2016 Mary Ann Liebert

    Y Wei, Y Chen, T Ren, Qiao Chen, C Yan, Y Yang, Y Li
    [paper]

  6. Optimization-based Automatic Parameter Tuning for Stereo Vision

    Conference: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE)

    E Cheung, Qiao Chen, J Wong, J Pan
    [paper]

Projects