Kai Zhang (张 凯)


School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Suzhou, China

Email: kaizhang@nju.edu.cn          cskaizhang@gmail.com
[Google Scholar] [Github] [ResearchGate] [ORCID] [Semantic Scholar] [DBLP]

I am looking for self-motivated undergraduate and graduate (Master/Ph.D.) students to join our group. Please send me your CV if you have interest.

课题组现招收1名研究助理以及1名2025级博士研究生(明年9月份入学)。

Biography

I am an Associate Professor of the School of Intelligence Science and Technology at Nanjing University, as of March 2024. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. I received my Ph.D. degree from School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, China, in 2019, under the supervision of Prof. Lei Zhang and Prof. Wangmeng Zuo. I was a research assistant from July, 2015 to July, 2017 and from July, 2018 to April, 2019 in Department of Computing of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Research Interest

I work in the field of image processing, with a specific focus on developing deep learning techniques for inverse problems in low-level computer vision. I mainly explore incorporating model-based methods and learning-based methods for flexible, effective, efficient and interpretable image restoration. Recently, I focus on the following research topics:

PyTorch Toolbox for Image Restoration

News

Selected Publications

 

MoVideo: Motion-Aware Video Generation with Diffusion Models

Jingyun Liang, Yuchen Fan, Kai Zhang*, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool, Rakesh Ranjan
European Conference on Computer Vision, 2024.
[Paper] [Project page] [BibTex]

 

Practical Blind Image Denoising via Swin-Conv-UNet and Data Synthesis

Kai Zhang*, Yawei Li, Jingyun Liang, Jiezhang Cao, Yulun Zhang, Tao Tang, Deng-Ping Fan, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool
Machine Intelligence Research, 2023.
[Paper] [PyTorch Testing Code] [Online demo] [BibTex]

 

Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attention

Jingyun Liang, Yuchen Fan, Xiaoyu Xiang, Rakesh Ranjan, Eddy Ilg, Simon Green, Jiezhang Cao, Kai Zhang*, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool
Thirty-sixth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

Towards Interpretable Video Super-Resolution via Alternating Optimization

Jiezhang Cao, Jingyun Liang, Kai Zhang*, Wenguan Wang, Qin Wang, Yulun Zhang, Hao Tang, Luc Van Gool
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Deep Denoiser Prior

Kai Zhang, Yawei Li, Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence(IEEE TPAMI), 2022.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

Deep plug-and-play and deep unfolding methods for image restoration (Book chapter)

Kai Zhang, Radu Timofte
In: E.R. Davies and Matthew A. Turk (eds.), Advanced Methods and Deep Learning in Computer Vision, Academic Press, 2022.
[Paper] [BibTex]

 

SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer

Jingyun Liang, Jiezhang Cao, Guolei Sun, Kai Zhang*, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCVW), 2021.
[Paper] [PyTorch Testing Code] [PyTorch Training Code] [BibTex]

 

Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution

Kai Zhang, Jingyun Liang, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

Hierarchical Conditional Flow: A Unified Framework for Image Super-Resolution and Image Rescaling

Jingyun Liang, Andreas Lugmayr, Kai Zhang*, Martin Danelljan, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

Mutual Affine Network for Spatially Variant Kernel Estimation in Blind Image Super-Resolution

Jingyun Liang, Guolei Sun, Kai Zhang*, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

Towards Flexible Blind JPEG Artifacts Removal

Jiaxi Jiang, Kai Zhang*, Radu Timofte
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

Flow-based Kernel Prior with Application to Blind Super-Resolution

Jingyun Liang, Kai Zhang*, Shuhang Gu, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

AIM 2020 Challenge on Efficient Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

Kai Zhang, Martin Danelljan, Yawei Li, Radu Timofte, others
European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ECCVW), 2020.
[Paper] [BibTex]

 

Deep Unfolding Network for Image Super-Resolution

Kai Zhang, Luc Van Gool, Radu Timofte
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

Neural Blind Deconvolution Using Deep Priors

Dongwei Ren, Kai Zhang, Qilong Wang, Qinghua Hu, Wangmeng Zuo
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition(CVPR), 2020.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Perceptual Extreme Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

Kai Zhang, Shuhang Gu, Radu Timofte, and others
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops(CVPRW), 2020.
[Paper] [BibTex]

 

AIM 2019 Challenge on Constrained Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

Kai Zhang, Shuhang Gu, Radu Timofte, and others
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCVW), 2019.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code of Winner] [BibTex]

 

Deep Plug-and-Play Super-Resolution for Arbitrary Blur Kernels

Kai Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019.
[Paper] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex]

 

Learning a Single Convolutional Super-Resolution Network for Multiple Degradations

Kai Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018.
[Paper] [Matlab Code] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex] [Citations: 670+]

 

Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration

Kai Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo, Shuhang Gu, Lei Zhang
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017.
[Paper] [Matlab Code] [BibTex] [Citations: 1400+]

 

FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN-based Image Denoising

Kai Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 27(9): 4608-4622, 2018.
[Paper] [Matlab Code] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex] [Citations: 1300+]

 

Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising

Kai Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo, Yunjin Chen, Deyu Meng, Lei Zhang
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 26(7): 3142-3155, 2017.
[Paper] [Matlab Code] [PyTorch Code] [BibTex] [Citations: 4900+]

 

End-to-End Blind Image Quality Assessment Using Deep Neural Networks

Kede Ma, Wentao Liu, Kai Zhang, Zhengfang Duanmu, Zhou Wang, Wangmeng Zuo
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 27(3): 1202-1213, 2017.
[Paper] [Project Page] [BibTex] [Citations: 300+]

 

Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs

Shi Guo, Zifei Yan, Kai Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019.
[Paper] [Code] [BibTex] [Citations: 550+]

 

Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Denoising and Restoration (Book chapter)

Wangmeng Zuo, Kai Zhang, Lei Zhang
In: M. Bertalmio (eds.), Denoising of Photographic Images and Video: Fundamentals, Open Challenges and New Trends, Springer, 2018.
[Paper] [BibTex]

 

Joint Learning of Multiple Regressors for Single Image Super-Resolution

Kai Zhang, Baoquan Wang, Wangmeng Zuo, Hongzhi Zhang, Lei Zhang.
IEEE Signal Processing Letters (SPL), 23, (1): 102-106, 2016.
[Paper] [BibTex] [Citations: 30+]

 

Revisiting Single Image Super-Resolution Under Internet Environment: Blur Kernels and Reconstruction Algorithms

Kai Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhou, Hongzhi Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo.
Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM), 2015: 677-687
[Paper] [BibTex]

Services

Workshop Organizers:

  • Co-organizer of ECCV 2020 Workshop on Advanced Image Manipulation (AIM).

  • Co-organizer of CVPR 2020 Workshop on New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE).

  • Co-organizer of ICCV 2019 Workshop on Advanced Image Manipulation (AIM).

Journal Reviewer:

  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
  • International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
  • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)
  • IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)
  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)
  • Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU)
  • Signal Processing Letters (SPL)

Conference Reviewer:

  • IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
  • International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
  • European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
  • AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
  • International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)

Students Co-supervised

PhD students:

Master students:

Awards

  • Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of HIT, 2021
  • First Prize of Natural Science Award of Heilongjiang Province, 2020
  • Outstanding student paper award of HIT, 2018
  • Fourth place of NTIRE 2018 challenge on single image super-resolution, 2018
  • National scholarship for doctoral students, 2017
  • Outstanding student paper award of HIT, 2017
  • First prize of GUANGXI International Academic Forum, 2017
  • Best poster award of Valse2017, 2017

Collaborators