Long Quan

Timeline

1. 1988–1989

   Doctoral studies in France

   After growing up in Taiyuan and studying at Northern Jiaotong University, he goes to France on a Ministry of Education program. His image-matching paper, written under Roger Mohr at a joint laboratory of INPL, CNRS and INRIA, is accepted at the second ICCV in 1988, and he receives his PhD in computer science in 1989.

2. 1990–2001

   CNRS researcher at INRIA Grenoble

   He works as a French CNRS senior research scientist at INRIA in Grenoble from 1990 and is a founding member of the INRIA Grenoble Computer Vision Group. In the 1990s, he contributes to fundamental 3D vision algorithms, including the minimum six-point algorithm from three views and projective reconstruction from multiple views. A PhD thesis he directs, by Peter Sturm, wins the Gilles Kahn prize in 1998.

3. 2001–2009

   Founding a vision group at HKUST

   He joins the Department of Computer Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2001 to found his computer vision group, which becomes the VisGraph lab. In 2005, the lab publishes its first image-based modeling work at SIGGRAPH, on hair, and in 2006 his team publishes research on modeling plants. HKUST students elect him one of the Best Ten Lecturers in 2004 and 2009.

4. 2009–2010

   IEEE Fellow and Image-Based Modeling

   He is elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2009 for contributions to three-dimensional computer vision. In 2010, Springer publishes his book Image-Based Modeling, a text focused on vision geometry for graduate students, researchers and engineers in computer vision, graphics, image processing, robotics, virtual reality and photogrammetry.

5. 2011–2022

   General chair of ICCV and CVPR

   He serves as General Chair of ICCV 2011 in Barcelona. In 2022, he is one of four General Chairs of CVPR in New Orleans, together with Rama Chellappa, Jiri Matas and Mubarak Shah.

6. 2015

   Co-founding Altizure

   In 2015, he, Tian Fang and some PhD students found Altizure, a platform that converts aerial photos from drones into 3D models. The HKUST team develops and funds the platform's crowd-sourced Altizure Earth.

7. 2018

   MVSNet and deep 3D reconstruction

   In 2018, he coauthors MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo with Yao Yao, Zixin Luo, Shiwei Li and Tian Fang, an end-to-end deep learning architecture for depth map inference from multi-view images, accepted to ECCV 2018. He also gives an ICPR 2018 keynote titled "The Challenges of 3D Reconstruction with Deep Learning".

8. As of October 2026

   Professor at HKUST

   He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST. In 2025, he coauthors CVPR papers including Mani-GS, on Gaussian splatting manipulation with a triangular mesh, and DepthCrafter, on generating consistent long depth sequences for open-world videos. His Spring 2026 course COMP5421 Computer Vision takes a perspective for AI agents and world models.