My research area is visual computing, which includes computer graphics, computer vision, and multimedia. My goal is to develop technologies to support high-quality visual content production, provide convenient tools to visualize and interact with visual content, and enable computational understanding of visual quality. Accordingly, my research effort has been devoted to three topics: computational photography and cinematography, computational aesthetics, and video visualization and interaction. Besides these topics, I am also exploring two new topics, aggregation for visual computing and wearable visual sensing such as smart glasses and smart helmet that aim to provide a wearable platform for monitoring human activities and their interaction with the environment.

My research has resulted in over 80 publications in premier venues like SIGGRAPH, CVPR, ICCV, CHI, and IJCAI as well as prestigious awards, such as the best paper honorable mention awards at the prestigious ACM CHI and ACM Multimedia conferences, Google Faculty Research Award, and Intel Early-Career Faculty Honor Program Award. My research has also been transferred into commercial products and widely used in mainstream movies. To support my research, I have obtained about $2.5 million research support from NSF as well as companies like Google, Intel, Adobe, Samsung, Snap, Sharp, Nvidia, and Sony.

Selected Projects:
Neural Video Frame Interpolation
VR Video Editing and Interfaces
Computational Stereoscopic Cinematography
Video Stabilization
Video Interaction and Visualization
Panorama
Saliency Analysis
Aesthetics  
Tech Transfer
Selected Papers:
3D Ken Burns Effect from a Single Image
Simon Niklaus, Long Mai, Jimei Yang, and Feng Liu
ACM Transactions on Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH Asia  2019) Code
Context-Aware Image Matting for Simultaneous Foreground and Alpha Estimation
Qiqi Hou and  Feng Liu
IEEE ICCV  2019 Code
Softmax Splatting for Video Frame Interpolation
Simon Niklaus and Feng Liu
IEEE CVPR 2020 (Rank 1st in the relevant Middlebury benchmark)

Context-aware Synthesis for Video Frame Interpolation
Simon Niklaus and Feng Liu
IEEE CVPR 2018
 
Video Frame Interpolation via Adaptive Convolution
Simon Niklaus, Long Mai,
and Feng Liu
IEEE CVPR 2017 (spotlight)

Video Frame Interpolation via Adaptive Separable Convolution
Simon Niklaus, Long Mai,
and Feng Liu
IEEE ICCV 2017 Code
Depth Conflict Reduction for Stereo VR Video Interfaces
Cuong Nguyen, Stephen DiVerdi, Aaron Hertzmann,
and Feng Liu
ACM CHI 2018
Vremiere: In-headset Virtual Reality Video Editing
Cuong Nguyen, Stephen DiVerdi, Aaron Hertzmann,
and Feng Liu
ACM CHI 2017 (best paper honorable mention award)
CloverVR is based on this project. Live demo at Adobe Max 2016
Incorporated into Immersive 360° editing in Adobe Creative Cloud

CollaVR : Collaborative In-Headset Review for VR Video
Cuong Nguyen, Stephen DiVerdi, Aaron Hertzmann,
and Feng Liu
ACM UIST 2017
Composition-preserving Deep Photo Aesthetics Assessment
Long Mai, Hailin Jin
and Feng Liu
IEEE CVPR 2016
Gaze-based Notetaking for Learning from Lecture Videos
Cuong Nguyen
and Feng Liu
ACM CHI 2016
Casual Stereoscopic Panorama Stitching
Fan Zhang
and Feng Liu
IEEE CVPR 2015  
Kernel Fusion for Better Image Deblurring
Long Mai
and Feng Liu
IEEE CVPR 2015  
Making Software Tutorial Video Responsive
Cuong Nguyen
and Feng Liu
ACM CHI 2015  (best paper honorable mention award)
Parallax-tolerant Image Stitching
Fan Zhang
and Feng Liu
IEEE CVPR 2014  
Depth Enhancement via Low-rank Matrix Completion
Si Lu, Xiaofeng Ren,
and Feng Liu
IEEE CVPR 2014  
Direct Manipulation Video Navigation on Touch Screens
Cuong Nguyen,
Yuzhen Niu, and Feng Liu
ACM MobileHCI 2014
Joint Subspace Stabilization for Stereoscopic Video
Feng Liu,
Yuzhen Niu, and Hailin Jin
IEEE ICCV 2013  
Direct Manipulation Video Navigation in 3D
Cuong Nguyen,
Yuzhen Niu, and Feng Liu
ACM CHI 2013  (best paper honorable mention award)
Enabling Warping on Stereoscopic Images
Yuzhen Niu, Wu-chi Feng, and Feng Liu
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2012)
Leveraging Stereopsis for Saliency Analysis
Yuzhen Niu, Yujie Geng, Xueqing Li, and Feng Liu
IEEE CVPR 2012
Video Summagator: An Interface for Video Summarization and Navigation
Cuong Nguyen, Yuzhen Niu, and Feng Liu
ACM CHI 2012

Subspace Video Stabilization
Feng Liu, Michael Gleicher, Jue Wang, Hailin Jin, and Aseem Agarwala
ACM Transactions on Graphics (presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2011),
Vol. 30, Issue 1, 2011

The all-new Warp Stabilizer effect in Adobe After Effects CS5.5 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS 6.0 is largely based on this research.

Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization
Feng Liu, Michael Gleicher, Hailin Jin, and Aseem Agarwala
ACM Transactions on Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH 2009)
Our video is selected as one of the five Top Videos of 2009 by the New Scientist magazine. Detail

Re-Cinematography: Improving the Camera Dynamics of Casual Video

Michael Gleicher and Feng Liu
ACM Multimedia 2007 (best paper runner-up)

Learning Color and Locality Cues for Moving Object Detection and Segmentation
Feng Liu and Michael Gleicher 
IEEE CVPR 2009
Discovering Panoramas in Web Video
Feng Liu, Yu-hen Hu, and Michael Gleicher
ACM Multimedia 2008
Honors and Awards:
  • Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, ACM CHI 2017
  • Google Faculty Research Award, 2015
  • ACM Recognition of Service Award, 2015
  • Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, ACM CHI 2015
  • Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, ACM CHI 2013
  • Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Program Award, 2012
  • Graduate Student Research Award (best thesis award), Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2010
  • IBM Watson Emerging Leaders in Multimedia, 2008
  • Best Paper Award Nominee, ACM Multimedia 2007