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Photograph Copyright Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Xiaoou Tang (24 January 1968–15 December 2023)

The Editors-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) are deeply saddened by the significant loss of Xiaoou Tang, a former Editor-in-Chief of IJCV, who passed away on 15 December 2023 at the age of 55.

Xiaoou obtained his B.S. degree in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1990, an M.S. degree from the University of Rochester in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996. After graduating from MIT, Xiaoou taught in the Department of Information Engineering of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he founded the Multimedia Laboratory in 2001. From 2005 to 2008, Xiaoou worked at Microsoft Research Asia, where he led the Visual Computing Group. In 2014, he co-founded SenseTime, which has grown as one of the leading AI companies. Xiaoou was a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Information Engineering of CUHK. He was an IEEE fellow (elevated 2009).

He was well known as a leading figure in computer vision. He served as a Program Chair and General Chair for the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 2009 and 2019, respectively. He was on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) and an Editor-in-Chief of IJCV. He was honored with the Best Paper Award at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision (CVPR) in 2009.

Xiaoou’s expertise covered a wide spectrum of computer vision and image processing areas. Among the pioneering and influential examples, he significantly advanced the facial recognition system to the level that exceeded human capability when their GaussianFace system designed by him and collaborators, achieving a world-record accuracy of 98.52% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild benchmark in 2014. He is also well known for his number of excellent works on image super-resolution, image haze removal, and object detection and recognition.

Xiaoou’s influence went beyond his research achievements. Throughout two decades, he guided and inspired a new generation of scholars in the fields of AI and computer vision, creating a lasting imprint for generations to come. For those fortunate enough to have known Xiaoou, his clever wit remains memorable, making the time with him both pleasant and intellectually engaging. He will be greatly missed, but his memory will serve as an enduring source of inspiration, motivating all of us to strive for better things.