YingLi Tian

Dr. Ying-Li Tian is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York since 2008. She received her PhD from the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1996 and her BS and MS from TianJin University, China in 1987 and 1990. She is experienced in computer vision topics ranging from object recognition, photometric modeling and shape from shading, to human identification, 3D reconstruction, motion/video analysis, Multi-sensor fusion, and facial expression analysis.

After she worked in National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, Dr. Tian joined the Robotics Institute in Carnegie Mellon University as a postdoctoral fellow. She focused on automatic facial expression analysis. From 2001 to 2008, Dr. Tian was a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorn, New York. She focused on moving object detection, tracking, and event and activity analysis. She was one of the inventors of the IBM Smart Surveillance Solutions (SSS) and was leading the video analytics team. She received the IBM Invention Achievement Awards every year from 2002 to 2007. She also received the IBM Outstanding Innovation Achievement Award in 2007. As an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, she co-taught a course on Automatic Video Surveillance (Spring 2008). Dr. Tian has published more than 70 papers in journals and conferences and has filed 28 patents. She is a senior member of IEEE. Website

• Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996
• M.S., Thermophysical Engineering, Tianjin University, China, 1990
• B.S., Precision Instrument and Opto-Electronics Engineering, Tianjin University, China, 1987

• ENGR 103: Computer-Aided Analysis Tools for Engineers (Fall 2008)
• I2200: Digital Image Processing (Spring 2009)

Computer Vision, Multi-sensor Fusion, Human-computer Interaction, Remote Sensing, and Pattern Recognition.

• Y.-L. Tian, A.W. Senior, A. Hampapur, L. Brown, Chiao-fe Shu, and Max Lu, “IBM Smart Surveillance System (S3): Event Based Video Surveillance System with an Open and Extensible Framework”, Invited paper on Special Issue of Machine Vision and Applications Journal.
• Ying-Li Tian, A. Hampapur, L. Brown, Rogerio Feris, Max Lu, Andrew Senior, Chiso-fe Shu, and Yun Zhai, “Event detection, query, and retrieval for video surveillance”, In book Artificial Intelligence for Maximizing Content Based Image Retrieval, Edited by Zonmin Ma, Published by Idea Group Inc., 2008.
• G. Pingali, Ying-Li Tian, S. Ebadollahi, J. Pelecanos, M. Podlaseck, and H. Stavropoulos, “An End-to-end eChronicling System for Mobile Human Surveillance”, In book Multimodal Surveillance: Sensors, Algorithms and Systems, Edited by ZhiGang Zhu and Thomas Huang, Artech House Publishers, 2007.
• A.W. Senior, A. Hampapur, Y.-L. Tian, L. Brown, S. Pankanti, and R. Bolle, “Appearance Models for Occlusion Handling”, Journal of Image and Vision Computing Volume 24 Issue 11, pp 1233-1243, November 2006.
• A.W. Senior, S. Pankanti, A. Hampapur, L. Brown, Y.-L. Tian, A. Ekin, J. Connell, Chiao-fe Shu, and Max Lu, “Enabling Video Privacy through Computer Vision,” IEEE Security & Privacy – Infrastructure Security, vol. 3, No. 3, May/June 2005.
• Hampapur, L. Brown, J. Connell, Max Lu, Hans Merkl, S. Pankanti, A.W. Senior, Chiao-fe Shu, and Y.-L. Tian, “Multi-scale Tracking for Smart Video Surveillance,” IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 22, No. 2, March 2005.
• K. Schmidt, J. F. Cohn and Ying-Li Tian, “Signal characteristics of spontaneous facial expressions: Automatic movement in solitary and social smiles” In book What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using The Facisl Action Coding Systems (FACS), Second Edition, Edited by Paul Ekman and Erika L. Rosenberg, Elsevier Science Publishers, Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Senior, A. Hampapur, L. Brown, Y.-L. Tian, C.-F. Shu and S. Pankanti, “Distributed Active Multi-camera Networks”, Ambient Intelligence ed. P.Remagnino. G.L. Foresti and T.Ellis. Kluwer Publishing 2004.
• Yingli Tian, T. Kanade and J. F. Cohn, “Facial Expression Analysis” In book Handbook of Face Recognition, Edited by Stan Li and A.K. Jain, Springer-Verlag January, 2004.
• Ying-Li Tian, “Automatic Facial Expression Analysis”, Robotics and Machine Perception, SPIE International Technical Group Newsletter, 2004.
• K. Schmidt, J. F. Cohn and Ying-Li Tian, Signal characteristics of spontaneous facial expressions: Automatic movement in solitary and social smiles. Biological Psychology, 65, 49-66, 2003.
• Sharath Pankanti, Andrew Senior, Lisa Brown, Arun Hampapur, Ying-Li Tian, and Ruud Bolle, “PeopleVision: Privacy Protection in Visual Surveillance”, IEEE Pervasive Computing Work in Progress, Volume 2 No. 1, January-March 2003. p. 96
• Yingli Tian, T. Kanade and J. F. Cohn, “Recognizing action units for facial expression analysis” In book Multi-modal interface for human machine communication, Machine perception and artificial intelligence series. 2002.
• Yingli Tian, T. Kanade and J. F. Cohn, " Recognizing Action Units for Facial Expression Analysis ", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 23, No. 2, February, 2001
• K.L. Schmidt, V. Monaco, B. Peters, J. VanSwearingen, Yingli Tian, and J. F. Cohn, “Relation between automatic tracking of lip-corner motion and facial surface EMG of the zygomaticus major muscle during spontaneous smiles. Society for Psychophysiological Research, San Diego, October, 2000.
• Yingli Tian, Hungtat Tsui, S.Y. Yeung and Songde Ma, ``Shape from Shading for Multiple Light Sources'', Journal of Optical Society of America A, pp36-52, Vol. 16, No. 1, Jan. 1999.
• Yingli Tian and Songde Ma "Shape Recovery by Neural Network in Unknown Light Environment", ACTA AUTOMATICA SINICA, Vol. 25, No. 2, March, 1999.
• Yingli Tian and Songde Ma "3D Shape Recovery by Genetic Algorithm", Journal of Image and Graphics(in Chinese), Vol. 4(A), 1999.
• Yingli Tian and Songde Ma "Extended Spherical light based Shape from Shading", ACTA OPTICAL SINICA, Vol. 18, No. 10, Oct., 1998.
• Yan Xu, Changsheng Xu, Yingli Tian and Songde Ma,''3D Face Image Acquisition and Reconstruction System'', Journal of Image and Graphics(in Chinese), Vol.3, No.2, 1998.
• Yingli Tian and Hungtat Tsui, "Shape Recovery from a Color Image for Non-Lambertian Surface", Journal of Optical Society of America A, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp397--404, Feb. 1997.