Dr Fan Zhang

Dr Fan (Aaron) Zhang received my PhD degree at the University of Bristol (2008--2012, funded through an ORSAS scholarship), under the supervision of Professor David Bull, with a thesis on perceptual video compression. The parametric video coding framework, which he developed during my PhD, offers world leading compression results based on the use of texture analysis and synthesis, exploiting techniques from computer graphics, and provides immense potential for further improvement in rate-quality optimisation and residual compression. It still remains one of the best compression algorithms of its type.

Aaron is currently working as a Research Associate (2012-present) in the Visual Information Laboratory at the University of Bristol, undertaking research projects on video quality assessment, immersive video formats and perceptual video coding. In this post, he has designed a full-reference perceptual video quality metric, which achieves excellent correlation with subjective ground truth, and has been used in video compression for rate quality optimisation. He has also led research on rate quality optimisation, subjective quality assessment, reduced-reference quality metrics, and immersive video formats. His current research interests include perceptual resolution adaptation, compression and quality assessment of immersive video content, wavelet-based video coding, and machine learning inspired quality assessment. He has won funding for these competitivity under the BVI EPSRC Platform grant.

Dr Zhang's multidisciplinary research interests provide him opportunities to collaborate with vision experts in Engineering, Psychology, and Cinematography. He has also worked with external researchers from BBC R&D, Fraunhofer HHI Berlin, RWTH Aachen University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Since 2010, Dr Zhang has published 15 conference papers, 6 journal papers, and 1 book chapter. He has also co-supervised 3 PhD and 10 MSc/BSc students with various research projects. He has helped to secure two research grants (Parametric Video Compression and Vision for the Future) from EPSRC as a nominated researcher.