Advancing
Visual Intelligence
for a Better World.
We are a research lab at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University led by Chair Professor Lei Zhang, working on the frontiers of computer vision, multimodal foundation models, and generative AI.
“Y learning and beyond — for future visual enhancement and understanding.” — VCLab Mission
Rooted at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Our lab sits inside the Department of Computing on PolyU's brick‑red Hung Hom campus — home to Li Ka Shing Tower, the Jockey Club Innovation Tower by Zaha Hadid, and a vibrant community of researchers pushing the boundaries of science and design.
A home for curious visual-intelligence researchers.
Based in the Department of Computing, PolyU, VCLab explores both fundamental and applied problems in visual computing, with strong industrial collaboration and a global publication footprint.
The Visual Computing Lab (VCLab) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University pursues research across the full stack of modern visual intelligence — from low-level image and video restoration, through multimodal perception and reasoning, to large-scale generative models, 3D reconstruction, new network architectures and rigorous evaluation benchmarks.
Our work is regularly published in top-tier venues including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, TPAMI and IJCV. Prof. Zhang is also with OPPO Research Institute, supporting active industry-connected research.
We welcome talented students, postdocs and interns who care deeply about visual intelligence. If our mission resonates with you, come join us →
Research collections.
One unified vision.
Explore selected research themes and collections. Click any card to see related publications, code and demos.
Image / Video Restoration, Enhancement & Quality Assessment
Leading research on real-world super-resolution, denoising, deblurring, HDR, flicker removal and perceptual quality assessment.
Explore collection → 02Multimodal Perception, Understanding & Reasoning
MLLM-driven visual perception, grounding and reasoning — enhancing the multi-tasking capabilities of large multimodal models.
Explore collection → 03Image & Video Synthesis and Generation
Accelerating, distilling and improving diffusion / autoregressive / DiT-based generative models for images and videos.
Explore collection → 043D Perception, Reconstruction & Generation
Sensing, reconstructing, synthesizing and editing high-fidelity 3D worlds from images, videos and language prompts.
Explore collection → 05Architecture & Training Paradigms
Novel architectures of vision transformers, LLMs / VLMs and efficient, decentralized training paradigms for frontier models.
Explore collection → 06Benchmarks & Datasets
Evaluation benchmarks and training datasets driving rigorous, reproducible progress for the visual computing community.
Explore collection →What's happening at VCLab.
Recent work from our lab.
A curated selection of recent VCLab publications. For the full list, see Prof. Zhang's publication page ↗.
People behind the work.
A close-knit research team passionate about pushing visual intelligence forward.
Our alumni are now at leading universities and companies including MSRA, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, Meituan, Tencent AI Lab, Alibaba DAMO, OPPO, ByteDance and more.
Join us in shaping
the future of visual intelligence.
We are recruiting PhD students (jointly trained with OPPO Research Institute), postdocs and research interns in areas including image / video restoration and enhancement, image / video generation, LLM / VLM, Mobile MLLM, visual understanding, quality assessment and unified models.
Get in touch.
Prof. Lei Zhang
Department of Computing
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Office: PQ816
Email: cslzhang [at] comp.polyu.edu.hk
For general lab inquiries, collaborations and press, please email Prof. Lei Zhang. For prospective students, please include your CV and a brief statement of interest.