PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Pengfei Zhu

Also known as Peng-Fei Zhu, 朱鹏飞

Pengfei Zhu is a computer vision researcher who builds benchmarks and methods for drone-based visual perception. After studying at Harbin Institute of Technology and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, he became an associate professor at Tianjin University in 2015. In 2018, he co-authored the VisDrone benchmark of drone-captured images and videos from 14 cities across China, with challenge workshops at ECCV 2018, ICCV 2019, ECCV 2020 and ICCV 2021, and in 2020 he co-authored the ECA-Net channel attention module presented at CVPR 2020. He received the Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Youth Award in 2021, the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars in 2023, and first prizes from the Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award and the Tianjin Natural Science Award in 2024. He is a professor at Tianjin University's School of Artificial Intelligence, where his research field is low-altitude intelligence.

Timeline

  1. 2005–2015

    Studies at Harbin and Hong Kong Polytechnic

    He studies at Harbin Institute of Technology as an undergraduate from 2005 and as a master's student until 2011. From 2011 to 2015, he pursues doctoral study at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he also works as a research assistant from July 2014 to July 2015.

  2. 2015–2022

    Associate professor at Tianjin

    From August 2015 to December 2022, he is an associate professor in the College of Intelligence and Computing at Tianjin University.

  3. 2018–2021

    The VisDrone drone benchmark

    In 2018, he is first author of Vision Meets Drones: A Challenge, which presents the VisDrone2018 benchmark of 263 video clips and 10,209 images captured over 14 cities across China. He and his co-authors organize challenge workshops with ECCV 2018, ICCV 2019 and ECCV 2020, and his paper Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge appears in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence in 2021. He also coauthors the VisDrone-DET2021 report on the VisDrone2021 challenge held with ICCV 2021.

  4. 2020

    ECA-Net at CVPR 2020

    In 2020, he is a co-author of ECA-Net, an efficient channel attention module for deep convolutional neural networks, presented at CVPR 2020. The module has 80 parameters against 24.37M for a ResNet50 backbone and lifts Top-1 accuracy by more than 2%.

  5. 2021–2023

    Wu Wenjun and NSFC youth honours

    He receives the Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Youth Award from the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2021. In 2023, he is named a recipient of the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and of the Tianjin Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars by the Tianjin government.

  6. 2023–2025

    Professor at Tianjin University

    In July 2023, he becomes a professor in Tianjin University's College of Intelligence and Computing, a post he holds until October 2025.

  7. 2024

    Wu Wenjun and Tianjin first prizes

    In 2024, he receives the Science and Technology Progress first prize of the Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award from the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a Natural Science first prize from the Tianjin municipal government.

  8. Since October 2025

    Professor in Tianjin's AI school

    In October 2025, he becomes a professor in Tianjin University's School of Artificial Intelligence. His research field is low-altitude intelligence, and he supervises doctoral students.

Career

  1. Since 2015Tianjin UniversityAssociate Professor, Professor
  2. 2014–2015Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityResearch Assistant

Education

  1. 2015Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityPhD
  2. 2011Harbin Institute of TechnologyMaster's student
  3. From 2005Harbin Institute of TechnologyUndergraduate

From the biography.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Tianjin University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Tianjin University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Tianjin University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Tianjin University. Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Pengfei Zhu yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. 朱鹏飞-人工智能学院 - 天津大学 sai.tju.edu.cn. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Vision Meets Drones: A Challenge arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. VisDrone-DET2021: The Vision Meets Drone Object Detection Challenge Results openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CVPR 2020 Open Access Repository) openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 22 October 2026.