Huijing Zhao

Timeline

1. 1987–1999

   Peking University and Tokyo degrees

   She studies software in the Department of Computer Science at Peking University from 1987 to 1991. At the University of Tokyo's School of Engineering, she studies civil engineering from 1994 to 1996 for a master's degree and social infrastructure from 1996 to 1999 for a Ph.D.

2. 2003–2005

   Laser scanning of urban scenes

   In 2003, she publishes "Reconstructing a textured CAD model of an urban environment using vehicle-borne laser range scanners and line cameras" in Machine Vision and Applications. In 2005, she publishes "A novel system for tracking pedestrians using multiple single-row laser-range scanners" in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

3. 2009

   Most Influential Paper award

   In 2009, the IAPR Conference on Machine Vision and Application gives her the Most Influential Paper over the Decade Award. The award recognizes her 1998 paper "Reconstruction Textured Urban 3D Model by Fusing Ground-Based Laser Range Image and CCD Image", published at the IAPR Workshop on Machine Vision Application.

4. 2012–2019

   PSA-PKU Openlab on driving behavior

   In 2012, she and colleagues publish "Detection and Tracking of Moving Objects at Intersections using a Network of Laser Scanners" in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and she begins chairing the PSA-PKU Openlab on multimodal perception and reasoning for intelligent vehicles. She is principal investigator of its Peugeot Citroën driving-behavior project through 2019, and from 2013 her group drives an instrumented vehicle on public motorways in Beijing to collect on-road vehicle trajectories, more than 7,000 km with 10 different drivers.

5. 2015

   Valeo Innovation Challenge prize

   The FalconView team she supervises wins the first prize of 100,000 euros at the Valeo Innovation Challenge in 2015. Its project is a vision-based system for on-road vehicle detection and tracking through online road structure understanding.

6. 2016–2025

   Editor and committee roles

   She becomes an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles in 2016 and co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee AGV-ITS in 2021. From 2023 to 2025, she is a senior editor of IROS.

7. 2020–2023

   From SemanticPOSS to off-road segmentation

   In 2020, she and colleagues publish SemanticPOSS, a point cloud dataset with a large quantity of dynamic instances, at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium. In 2022, she and Zeyu Zhu publish "A Survey of Deep RL and IL for Autonomous Driving Policy Learning" in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. In 2023, she, Biao Gao and Xijun Zhao publish an active and contrastive learning framework for fine-grained off-road semantic segmentation.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor at Peking University

   She is a professor in Peking University's School of Intelligence Science and Technology, with research in machine perception, intelligent vehicles, autonomous driving and autonomous mobile robots. The PKU Omni Smart Sensing (POSS) lab she directs has its paper "TerraX: Visual Terrain Classification Enhanced by Vision-Language Models" accepted at IROS 2025.