Congratulations to our research student team consisted of Mr Liang Jie, Mr Yang Xi and Mr Zeng Hui on winning a First Class Award at the 1stNational Artificial Intelligence Challenge (NAIC) Award Presentation Ceremony held on 15 January 2020 in Shenzhen, China. The team well demonstrated their professional knowledge and skills in transferring AI technologies to industry solutions, competing among over 3,000 teams from 13 countries and regions.
NAIC included stages from the preliminary, semi-final to finals. The team took part in the “AI + 4K HDR” track under the theme of AI application in the 4K/ HD video processing field. They explored the performance of 4K high dynamic range (HDR) standard in terms of image resolution, details, colour and dynamic range, and designed practical solutions.
“The competition contained multiple intertwined tasks, some of which had contradictive objectives. Processing these tasks consume a lot of computational resources and time was somehow limited given such a complicated competition. We analyzed the overall objective, then divided the difficult problems into several more controllable subtasks. The divide-and-conquer strategy is a common practice widely used in designing a sophisticated system in the IT industry. We got inspiration from our internship experience at the Artificial Intelligence Centre of Alibaba DAMO Academy,” said Mr Hui, the team leader. “We would like to thank our supervisor, Prof. Lei Zhang, for his valuable technical and professional guidance. Besides, we would also express our gratitude to Alibaba for their support of computational resources during the competition.”
The team keeps improving the algorithms since winning the competition. They are collaborating with the DAMO Academy to convert their research to real-world applications, such as transforming the huge number of classical videos in standard dynamic range and limited resolution to high dynamic range video with 4K resolution, to meet the upcoming demands in the popularization of 4K displays.
Hosted by the Shenzhen Municipal People's Government of China, NAIC aims to create an atmosphere of artificial intelligence creation and to promote the integrated development of innovative elements including industry, academia, capital, and talent.
