Yuhao Chen

yhc.jpg

My research turns the real world into interactive digital twins — virtual counterparts that can be explored, manipulated, and simulated. I work across scales, from handheld objects to rooms and rinks to whole construction sites, spanning 2D and 3D perception, video understanding, 4D reconstruction, and generative modeling.

Background

I am a Research Assistant Professor and a PI at the Vision and Image Processing Lab, Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo. I hold NSERC Discovery Grant as Principal Investigator (“Digital Twinning of Food for Interactive Analysis and Simulation”), is Co-PI on the NRC-funded iVISION project, and is a co-investigator on a Miovision / Collaborate 2 Commercialize traffic analytics project. I joined VIP in 2020 as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Alexander Wong, became a Research Associate in 2022, and a Research Assistant Professor in 2023. I hold a B.Sc. (2015) and Ph.D. (2019) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, where I worked with Prof. Edward J. Delp in the VIPER lab.

Co-supervising 5 PhD and 9 MASc students · 130 undergraduates since 2022 · 93 papers (Google Scholar)

Research

  • Food — dietary monitoring from video, 3D geometry and portion measurement, generative food models
  • Sports — 3D mesh recovery, rink registration, action recognition, and tracking from broadcast video
  • Construction — long-term UAV site monitoring, change detection, level-of-detail Gaussian splatting
  • Robotics — grasping and bin picking, Gaussian-splatting SLAM, 3D scene graphs, embodied question answering

Professional Services

  • Chair — MetaFood Workshop at CVPR 2024, 2025, 2026
  • Co-Chair — IAAI-23, IAAI-24, CVIS-21, CVIS-22, CVIS-23; advisor for CVIS 2024–2025
  • Area Chair — ICASSP 2026, ICME 2024
  • Reviewer — CVPR, ICCV, ICRA, RA-L, IEEE TMM, ACM TOMM, IAAI, AI Magazine

Awards

  • 2025 Best Workshop Paper, IROS Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Workshop
  • 2025 Best Research Paper, Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference
  • 2024 Best Paper, Conference on Robots and Vision
  • 2022 Best Conference and Application Paper finalist, IEEE CASE

Talks

  • Apr 2025 From 3D Vision to Robot Perception — UCLA (host: Prof. Yuchen Cui)
  • Mar 2025 From 3D Reconstruction to Generation — Texas A&M (host: Prof. Zhengzhong Tu)
  • Oct 2023 Generative AI For Good: From Concept to Practice — Big Data and AI Toronto

News

  • Oct 2026 Hockey skating action recognition at the MMSports workshop, ACM Multimedia
  • Jun 2026 Four papers at CVPR 2026 workshops, including KitchenTwin
  • Mar 2026 Two papers at WACV 2026
  • Oct 2025 Best Workshop Paper at the IROS RGMCW
  • Jun 2025 FruitNinja at CVPR 2025, alongside eleven workshop papers