Thomas Huang

Huang died peacefully in Indiana on April 25, 2020 at the age of 83.

In 2015, Huang worked with Ann Willemsen-Dunlap in an interdisciplinary project to develop a 3-D computer-generated avatar, capable of showing appropriate emotions, to be used in online communication of medical information to patients.

Huang supervised more than 100 graduate students. In 2012, the Thomas and Margaret Huang Fund for Graduate Research was created in response to appeals by former students James J. Kuch and Chang Wen Chen, to celebrate the contributions of Huang and his wife as mentors and teachers as well as his contributions as a researcher. The fund will provide scholarships to support students in Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction at the Beckman Institute.

As of 2010 Huang had published more than 21 books and been an author on more than 600 papers. Representative publications by Thomas Huang include:

In 1980 Huang accepted a chair in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). On April 15, 1996, Huang became the first William L. Everitt Distinguished Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering at UIUC. He was involved with the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), and served as head of the Image Formation and Processing Group of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and co-chair of the Beckman Institute's research track on Human Computer Intelligent Interaction. As of 2012, he was named a Swanlund Chair, the highest endowed title at UIUC. Huang retired from teaching as of December 2014, but continued to be active as a researcher.

In 1984, Tsai and Huang were the first to present a frequency-domain multi-frame method which related the discrete Fourier transform of observed low-resolution satellite images from the acquisition stage to the continuous Fourier transform of the high-resolution image, using the inverse Fourier transform to obtain a final image with increased resolution. Huang also worked on wavelet methods of encoding and on fractal coding. Wavelet coding is particularly important for content based image retrieval from multimedia databases containing images, video, audio, and text. It enables searches to be done on smaller encoded images rather than on full-size retrieved images. Other research areas of importance include the use of relevance feedback in adapting database systems to user intentions (when browsing or searching), and constructing tables of contents and semantic indexes for video using multimedia information (image sequence, audio, and closed-captions if available).

Huang was a founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, and of Springer-Verlag's Springer Series in Information Sciences. He helped to organize the first International Picture Coding Symposium (1969), the first International Workshop on Very Low Bitrate Video Coding (1993), and the first International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (1995), all of which became repeated events.

Some of his earliest work dealt with image compression, extending later into areas of enhancement, restoration and analysis. He developed approaches for binary document compression that utilized 2-dimensional scanned information, examining the changes from one line of a scan to the next, and detecting transition points at which a subsequent line differs. Statistical predictions and experimental results of the model's performance conformed well. In 1969, Huang and Grant Anderson were one of the first teams to propose a method for block transform coding, building on the work of J. J. Y. Huang and Peter M. Schultheiss.

Huang accepted a position on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and remained there from 1963 to 1973. He accepted a position as an electrical engineering professor and director of the Information and Signal Processing Laboratory at Purdue University in 1973, remaining there until 1980.

Huang went on to the United States to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT he worked initially with Peter Elias, who was interested in information theory and image coding, and then with William F. Schreiber. At that time scanning equipment was not commercially available, so it was necessary to build a scanner for digitizing and reproducing images. Computer programs were written in assembly language using a prototype Lincoln Lab TX-0 computer. Descriptions of digitized images were stored on paper tape with punched holes. Huang was supervised by Schreiber for both his M.S. thesis, Picture statistics and linearly interpolative coding (1960), and his Sc.D. thesis, Pictorial noise (1963). His master's work focused on algorithms for image coding using adaptive techniques for interpolation with sensitivity to edges. His doctorate included work on the subjective effects of pictorial noise across a spectrum.

Huang was married to Margaret, who preceded him in death by three months. They married in 1959.

Thomas Shi-Tao Huang (traditional Chinese: 黃煦濤; simplified Chinese: 黄煦涛; pinyin: Huáng Xùtāo, June 26, 1936 – April 25, 2020) was a Chinese-born American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and writer. He was a researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Huang was one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition and human computer interaction.

Huang was born June 26, 1936, in Shanghai, Republic of China. In 1949, his family moved to Taiwan. Huang studied electronics at the National Taiwan University and received his bachelor's degree in 1956.