Hao (Richard) Zhang - 张皓
Associate Professor
GrUVi Lab, School of Computing Science, SFU
haoz At cs DoT sfu period ca
TASC I building, Room 8027; (O) 778-782-6843

Ph.D. (2003), Toronto (Dynamic Graphics Project)
MMath (1997), Waterloo (Computer Science)
BMath (1995), Waterloo (Faculty of Math)

"Darker colors and background save the planet!"

Picture of the day
Image sampled from our papers or ...

My research interests are in the areas of computer graphics and geometry processing. Recently, I am working on various problems for shape analysis, 3D content creation, and surface reconstruction. See the wordle page made up of titles of all my papers up to August 15, 2011. [new] I am now recruiting a Canadian student for the SFU-Zhejiang University Dual Degree Ph.D. program. The student will conduct research both in Vancouver and Hangzhou, China, and have the opportunity to work with some of the best graphics researchers in China!

News:

  • [new] January 19, 2012: Our five-year NSERC CRD project in collaboration with Object Raku Technology is starting officially this January. Raku specializes in LIDAR data processing and analysis technologies. The project is on LIDAR data feature extraction and receives funding from NSERC and Raku in the amount of $300,000 over five years.
  • [new] January 15, 2012: Eric and Kevin, who visited the group for two years each, have both become Assistant Professors in the National University of Defense Technologies, China. Kevin also won a Best Thesis Award in his university on "Semantics-Driven 3D Shape Analysis and Modeling".
  • [new] December 19, 2011: PPT slides for two courses I gave at SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 in Hong Kong are available from the right column: one on "Towards High-Level Geometry Processing" as part of the course on "Elements of Geometry Processing" with Bruno Levy and one on "Towards the First SIGGRAPH Paper" as part of the course on "How to Write a SIGGRAPH Paper".
  • [new] December 16, 2011: Congrats to Ibraheem on having his first paper accepted (to the Visual Computer). See video and paper.
  • [new] November 30, 2011: Oliver van Kaick successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on "Matching Dissimilar Shapes". Congrats, Dr. van Kaick!
  • [new] November 17, 2011: Amy Li will start an MITACS Accelerate Internship with PDFTron on intelligent PDF analysis and navigation.
  • [new] October 31, 2011: Eric concludes his visit at the GrUVi lab and is returning to China. It was nice having you here to work with us!
  • September 20, 2011: Two of our papers "Unsupervised Co-Segmentation of a Set of Shapes via Descriptor-Space Spectral Clustering" and "Structure-Preserving Retargeting of Irregular 3D Architecture" have been accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2011. Online versions of the papers are now available.
  • August 23, 2011: I co-organized a five-day Banff Workshop on "Geometry for Anatomy", August 28 - September 2. See my talk on symmetry analysis for shape processing (18 MB).
  • August 17, 2011: Check out some animation pieces submitted for the final project of CMPT 466 (Computer Animation)
  • August 16, 2011: Oliver van Kaick receives an MITACS Elevate Postdoc Fellowship valued at $65,000 per year. He will take up the position with our industrial partner PDFTron in Vancouver.
  • August 12, 2011: Check out some of the recent paper and invited talks in the right column, including the SIGGRAPH 2011 talk on photo-inspired modeling and the talk on Towards High-Level Geometry Processing I have given several times this year.
  • June 27, 2011: Our VASE (volume-aware surface evolution) paper has been accepted to SGP 2011. Congrats to Andrea!
  • June 22, 2011: Slides for SMI 2011 talk on point cloud silhouettes is available. In retrospect, the paper is really about how to find proper k-nearest neighbors (kNNs)!
  • April 7, 2011: Helmut Pottmann gives a Distinguished Lecture on Geometric Computing for Freeform Architecture.
  • April 6, 2011: Matt Olson successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on "A Plane View of Geometric Silhouettes". Congrats, Matt!
  • March 30, 2011: Congrats to Andrea who is awarded an Alexander Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship from NSERC; the award is given to the most selective group of scholarship applicants.
  • February 11, 2011: Congrats to Ibraheem who successfully defended his MSc thesis on detail-replicating shape stretching; see demo video and code.
  • December 4, 2010: Upcoming talk by Steven (Shlomo) Gortler on December 17. See talk announcement.
  • November 10, 2010: Upcoming talk by Ligang Liu who will be visiting me between Nov. 21 and 24. See talk announcement.
  • September 13, 2010: Final version of our three SIGGRAPH Asia papers are now available: 1. cone carving; 2. tree skeleton reconstruction; 3. style-content separation.
  • August 20, 2010: Visit from Johannes Kopf (Microsoft Research) and Dani Lischiski (Hebrew University) and talk by Johannes on Street Slide and Automatic Generation of Destination Maps.
  • July 26, 2010: Our SIGGRAPH 2010 course on spectral mesh processing has concluded. See this wiki from ALICEpedia for all the course-related information, including presentation slides. A previous version of the course was given at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.
  • May 12, 2010: Slides for my Eurographics 2010 State-of-the-Art Report (STAR) talk on shape correspondence is available here.
  • April 30, 2010: Andrea Tagliassachi has received the MITACS Best Student Paper Award for 2009. Congrats, Andrea!
  • January 12, 2010: One of our papers won the 2010 Most Cited Paper Award for the journal Computer-Aided Design. Papers for this distinction are determined solely based on the highest number of cites, excluding self-citations, received for all journal articles published in 2007-2009.
  • November 16, 2009: Due to popular demand, we are making the MATLAB code for our earlier paper on robust spectral shape correspondence available. Please download this ZIP file. The code can be easily adapted to compute the eigenvalue shape descriptors (EVD) from this paper. Instructions are contained in the README file. Note that this code does not contain a Nystrom approximation component, hence only somewhat small meshes (up to 5K vertices) should be tried on. The code was written by Varun Jain and last updated by Oliver van Kaick. If you have any questions, please ask Oliver or myself.

Recent papers/project pages

Recent talks

Code

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar;
I love not man the less, but Nature more.

- Lord Byron