National Engineering Research Center of Visual Technology (formerly known as the National Engineering Laboratory for Video Technology), at Peking University, was approved by the National Development and Reform Commission of the People's Republic of China in February 2009 and fully constructed in 2013. Under the leadership of the Ministry of Education, managed by Peking University, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. also participated in the platform construction and execution. In 2021, it was promoted to the list of national engineering research centers of the National Development and Reform Commission, and officially renamed as the National Engineering Research Center for Video and Visual Technology.
This center is mainly engaged in the research of video coding and intelligent visual information processing technology, and implements the "ultra-high definition + ultra-high speed" dual-wheel driving strategy around intelligent technology. Since 2009, it has received a total number of 6 national awards, including 1 first prize of national technological invention, 1 second prize of national technological invention, 3 second prizes of national scientific and technological progress, 1 second prize of national natural science, 1 special prize of provincial and ministerial level, and 2 first prizes of provincial and ministerial level. It was selected as one of the top 10 scientific and technological progresses in Chinese universities in 2009 and 2018, respectively, playing an important leading role in the frontier of interdisciplinary research.
In the field of video coding technology, this center has been an active leader in cutting-edge research. From the fundamental video coding algorithm research to the development of AVS series industry standards, national standards, and IEEE international standard, with independent intellectual property rights. The following pioneer academic contribution has been made, the establishment of video encoding and decoding patent pool, the development of coding and decoding core software, chip IP core and prototype products, the construction of testing, testing, verification and demonstration platforms and other series of work line through, realizing the "technology research, patent competition, standard formulation, chip development, industrial application" full chain innovation, the experimental development and verification of public support service center of the video industry, and the cultivation center of professional talents. The above contribution and advancement have shaped this center as the most innovative research institute in the worldwide computer technology field.
While continuously tracking the cutting-edge technology in this field, the engineering research center is forward-looking and future-oriented, and actively explores the direction of intelligent visual technology. It has made a major breakthrough in ultra-high speed vision and imaging, proposed a brain-inspired spiking computation model that subverts the concept of image and video, directly expresses photon flow instead of bit stream, and improves the speed of camera and machine vision by more than a thousand times, which is expected to fundamentally reshape the entire technical system of visual information processing.
The leadership member of this center consists of a director and three deputy directors. The director is academician Wen Gao. And the three deputy directors are professor Tiejun Huang, professor Siwei Ma and senior researcher Yun Jiang.
The center accepts the technical guidance of the technical committee. The engineering research center has three research departments and their subordinate laboratories: video research department, vision research department and intelligence research department, and has four branches and a comprehensive service department. It adopts an open mode to organize research and development work, extensively contacts the production, teaching and research units of video and vision technology for large-scale cooperation and fundamental research, and jointly promotes the research and development of core technologies in major projects and demands.
