Thomas Huang

Thomas Shi-Tao Huang (, June 26, 1936 – April 25, 2020) was a Chinese-born American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and writer.

He was a researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

Huang was one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition and human computer interaction.

Huang was born June 26, 1936, in Shanghai, Republic of China.

In 1949, his family moved to Taiwan.

Huang studied electronics at the National Taiwan University and received his bachelor's degree in 1956.

Huang went on to the United States to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

At MIT he worked initially with Peter Elias, who was interested in information theory and image coding, and then with William F. Schreiber.

At that time scanning equipment was not commercially available, so it was necessary to build a scanner for digitizing and reproducing images.

Computer programs were written in assembly language using a prototype Lincoln Lab TX-0 computer.

Descriptions of digitized images were stored on paper tape with punched holes.

Huang was supervised by Schreiber for both his M.S. thesis, Picture statistics and linearly interpolative coding (1960), and his Sc.D. thesis, Pictorial noise (1963).

His master's work focused on algorithms for image coding using adaptive techniques for interpolation with sensitivity to edges.

His doctorate included work on the subjective effects of pictorial noise across a spectrum.

Huang accepted a position on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and remained there from 1963 to 1973.

He helped to organize the first International Picture Coding Symposium (1969), the first International Workshop on Very Low Bitrate Video Coding (1993), and the first International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (1995), all of which became repeated events.

Huang's research tended to focus on the development of general concepts, methodologies, theories, and algorithms which have wide application to multimodal and multimedia signal processing.

While still at MIT, he developed the first algebraic procedure for testing the stability conditions of two-dimensional filters, based on double bilinear transformation and the Ansell method.

He also published on digital holography.

While at Purdue, he worked on nonlinear filters, particularly median filters, which became a standard technique for the removal of noise in images.

Some of his earliest work dealt with image compression, extending later into areas of enhancement, restoration and analysis.

He developed approaches for binary document compression that utilized 2-dimensional scanned information, examining the changes from one line of a scan to the next, and detecting transition points at which a subsequent line differs.

Statistical predictions and experimental results of the model's performance conformed well.

In 1969, Huang and Grant Anderson were one of the first teams to propose a method for block transform coding, building on the work of J. J. Y. Huang and Peter M. Schultheiss.

He accepted a position as an electrical engineering professor and director of the Information and Signal Processing Laboratory at Purdue University in 1973, remaining there until 1980.

In 1980 Huang accepted a chair in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

In 1984, Tsai and Huang were the first to present a frequency-domain multi-frame method which related the discrete Fourier transform of observed low-resolution satellite images from the acquisition stage to the continuous Fourier transform of the high-resolution image, using the inverse Fourier transform to obtain a final image with increased resolution.

Huang also worked on wavelet methods of encoding and on fractal coding.

Wavelet coding is particularly important for content based image retrieval from multimedia databases containing images, video, audio, and text.

It enables searches to be done on smaller encoded images rather than on full-size retrieved images.

Other research areas of importance include the use of relevance feedback in adapting database systems to user intentions (when browsing or searching), and constructing tables of contents and semantic indexes for video using multimedia information (image sequence, audio, and closed-captions if available).

In the area of 3-D modelling, Huang worked on the identification of three-dimensional motion and the structure of rigid objects given multiple images in which corresponding features can be identified.

This work was important for the compression of television images, for the development of image standards, and for research into human and computer vision.

Huang also worked on the 3-D modeling, analysis, and synthesis of images of the human face, hands, and body.

The initial motivation behind this research was to support low bitrate 3-D model-based video coding for video phone and teleconferencing.

On April 15, 1996, Huang became the first William L. Everitt Distinguished Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering at UIUC.

He was involved with the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), and served as head of the Image Formation and Processing Group of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and co-chair of the Beckman Institute's research track on Human Computer Intelligent Interaction.

As of 2012, he was named a Swanlund Chair, the highest endowed title at UIUC.

Huang retired from teaching as of December 2014, but continued to be active as a researcher.

Huang was a founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, and of Springer-Verlag's Springer Series in Information Sciences.