MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, gave a keynote speech at the Optoelectronic Imaging and Multimedia Technology Conference, part of 2014 Photonics Asia Program, on October 10, 2014, in Beijing International Convention Center, Beijing, China.

The title of Professor Kuo’s speech was “Big visual data analysis: challenges and solution strategies”. Due to the huge size and great diversity of visual data, big visual data analytics plays a critical role in applications such as large-scale image/video indexing, search and tagging. In this work, Professor Kuo addressed two competing factors that have a high impact on the performance of a classification system; namely, data diversity and data abundance. He presented two strategies to handle the data diversity problem – data grouping and decision stacking. Once the data diversity problem is well resolved, the solution will benefit from data abundance since more data samples allow a learning-based classifier to offer better performance. Professor Kuo used an indoor/outdoor scene classification problem to show the power of the proposed techniques in handling big visual data.

The Optoelectronic Imaging and Multimedia Technology Conference was chaired by Professor Qionghai Dai of Tsinghua University while Photonics Asia was co-organized by the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) and the Chinese Optical Society (COS). It was the largest annual event showcasing photonics and optical technologies and applications in Asia.