Mapping the Way Visualizing locations and finding the way to a new destination are set to become simpler, thanks to the discoveries of Prof Long Quan Navigating the world around us used to entail paper charts and maps, and the skill to interpret the system of signs and symbols that stood in for the real objects and features of the landscape. Not any more with the arrival of 3D mapping that visualizes the real-world route to your destination. Behind the opening salvos of simplifying travel for you and me lies an array of complex and lengthy research carried out over the past 30 years. It has taken this time and some of the world’s leading minds in computer vision to make such a development possible. Beyond, a host of significant uses now beckon. Among the global pioneers is Prof Long Quan, Computer Science and Engineering, who has devoted his entire academic career to the advancement of computer vision and 3D reconstruction from images through his own innovative contributions to these scientific areas and the mentoring of next-generation research stars. “This is the future,” said Prof Quan, Founding Director of the HKUST Center for Visual Computing and Image Science. “Your mobile phone will show you 3D images and it will be very convenient for moving around. Think of all the other uses for such maps too. Search and rescue teams would know the exact terrain they faced before they set out. The military could use 3D maps to guide missiles. “When I started, this was a relatively new field. But we already saw the potential for applications.” For Prof Quan, once a child artist who swapped paint brushes for computer vision, visual images are a fundamental element of life that speak to us directly. He has lived in this world of 3D reconstruction from the time of his graduate studies in France in the mid-1980s, which began with his Master’s at Université Henri Poincaré and was followed by a doctorate at the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine (INPL) (now both part of the University of Lorraine). The two institutions were leading establishments with laboratories affiliated with CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research) and INRIA (the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation). Prof Quan was a member of one of the earliest cohorts of Mainland students to receive a scholarship from the Ministry of Education to study overseas, following his graduation from Northern Jiaotong University (now Beijing Jiaotong University) in 1984. After earning his PhD in 1989, Prof Quan launched his academic career at INRIA Grenoble, France’s key public research institute focused on computational sciences, and contributed significantly to the development of modern 3D computer vision in the 1990s through his outstanding series of 3D reconstruction algorithms including the six-point algorithm and projective reconstruction from multiple views. He joined HKUST in 2001, where he remains fascinated by the potential of the area and expects to stay so in the decades ahead. 3 In Focus
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