Qiang Fu is a Senior Research Scientist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in the Computational Imaging Group, working with Prof. Wolfgang Heidrich.
Qiang Fu’s research centers on computational imaging, where optical systems and computational methods are jointly designed to develop next-generation technologies of acquiring, encoding, reconstructing and interpreting visual information. His work combines computational methods, optical system design, and micro/nanofabrication, with particular interests in physics-grounded AI, differentiable optimization, diffractive optics, and end-to-end imaging-system design. By leveraging computational models through fabricated optical components and integrated prototypes to experimental validation, his research aims to develop next-generation computational cameras and imaging systems with new sensing capabilities, including spectral, polarization, high-dynamic-range, and wavefront imaging.
Feel free to contact me by email: qiang.fu@kaust.edu.sa or fuqiangx@outlook.com
PhD in Optical Engineering, 2012
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
BSc in Mechanical Engineering, 2007
University of Science and Technology of China
Employment history
September 02, 2026 One paper Low latency gaze tracking via latent optical sensing was accepted by ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2026.
August 28, 2026 I served as a Technical Program Committee member at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2026.
July 15, 2026 I served as the Poster Co-Chair at ICCP 2026.
May 18, 2026 I have been appointed as an Associate Editor for Optica Optics Continuum.
April 03, 2026 One paper Double-helix optical point spread function enables real-time mesoscopic 3D functional microangiography in the living mouse brain and skull was published by Nature Communications.
March 04, 2026 One paper Task-driven lens design was published by Optica Optics Express.
December 02, 2025 One paper Scalable and precise diffractive optics via grayscale lithography and soft nanoimprinting was accepted by SPIE OptiFab 2026.
October 21, 2025 One paper Limitations of hyperspectral imaging from RGB images: An optics-aware analysis was accepted by IEEE TCI.
October 20, 2025 One paper Large-area fabrication-aware computational diffractive optics computational diffractive optics was accepted by ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 (ACM TOG).
August 30, 2025 I served as a Technical Program Committee member at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2025.
August 2, 2025 One paper Learned Off-aperture Encoding for Wide Field-of-view RGBD Imaging was accepted by ICCP 2025 and IEEE TPAMI.
June 14, 2025 Two papers Latent Space Imaging and Learned Binocular-Encoding Optics for RGBD Imaging Using Joint Stereo and Focus Cues were accepted by CVPR 2025.
December 31, 2024 Two papers An AI Curriculum for Learning Lens Design and Ultra-Wide-Angle High-Fidelity Holographic Displays , were featured in the Optics and Photonics News (OPN), Year in Optics 2024.
December 07, 2024 A paper End-to-end hybrid refractive-diffractive lens design with differentiable ray-wave model was accepted and presented at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 in Tokyo, Japan.
September 19, 2024 A paper Linearized wavefront sensing model for aberration retrieval from low-frequency Fourier coefficients was published by Optica JOSA A.
September 18, 2024 A paper Progressive Self-supervised Learning for CASSI Computational Spectral Cameras was published by IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging.
August 28, 2024 A paper Learned B-spline parametrization of lattice focal coding for monocular RGBD imaging was published by the IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography 2024.
August 03, 2024 A paper Curriculum learning for ab initio deep learned refractive optics was published in Nature Communications. It is covered by the KAUST Discovery Magazine.
July 23, 2024 Two short papers Limitations of hyperspectral imaging from RGB Images: A data perspective and Comparative performance analysis of multi-level diffractive lens and lens fabricated by grayscale lithography and soft-imprinting were presented in the Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging at the Optica Imaging Congress 2024 in Toulouse, France and ICCP 2024 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
July 20, 2024 A paper Split-aperture 2-in-1 computational cameras was published in ACM Transactions on Graphics and presented at SIGGRAPH 2024, Denver USA.
July 16, 2024 I received Optica Publishing Group’s 2024 Outstanding Reviewer Recognition.
June 16, 2024 A paper CAL2: project update of the NRC Canada facility-class focal plane wavefront sensor for the Gemini Planet Imager 2 upgrade and a poster SPIDERS: a pathfinder 4th generation planet imager were accepted and presented at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2024 in Yokohoma, Japan.
April 23, 2024 A paper Neural Étendue expander for ultra-wide-angle high-fidelity holographic display was published by Nature Communications.
November 30, 2023 Two papers Additive fabrication of SiO2-based micro-optics with lag-free depth and reduced roughness and Hexagonal diffractive optical elements were accepted by Optica Optics Express.
August 07, 2023 A paper Additive diffractive optical elements fabrication by PECVP deposition of SiO2 and lift-off process was accepted by SPIE Digital Optical Technologies 2023.
August 04, 2023 A paper Aberration-aware depth-from-focus was accepted by International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP) 2023, and selected in a special issue in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
July 17, 2023 I received the Harvard Higher Education Teaching Certificate by the Harvard Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
March 27, 2023 A paper Generalization of learned Fourier-based phase-diversity wavefront sensing was accepted by Optics Express.
Februray 05, 2023 A paper Extended depth-of-field projector using learned diffractive optics was accepted by IEEE VR 2023.
December 02, 2022 A paper Diffractive lensless imaging with optimized Voronoi-Fresnel phase was published by Optics Express.
September 12, 2022 A paper Phase-diversity wavefront sensing enhanced by a Fourier-based neural network was published by Optics Express.
August 29, 2022 Four papers Deployment of focal plane WFS technologies on 8-m telescopes: from the Subaru SPIDERS pathfinder, to the facility-class GPI 2.0 CAL2 system, and Optical design of SPIDERS, a Subaru Pathfinder Instrument for Detecting Exoplanets and Retrieving Spectra, and Performance of the FAST self coherent camera at the NEW-EARTH lab and a simplified SCC measurement algorithm, and Pupil-plane LLOWFS simulation and laboratory results from NEW-EARTH’s high-contrast imaging testbed were presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, Adaptive Optics Systems VIII.
July 13, 2022 A review A survey on computational spectral reconstruction methods from RGB to hyperspectral imaging was published by Scientific Reports.
June 16, 2022 A review Recent progress in computational imaging was published by Journal of Image and Graphics.
April 1, 2022 A paper Progressive polarization based reflection removal via realistic training data generation was published by Pattern Recognition.
October 22, 2021 A paper Etch-free additive lithographic fabrication methods for reflective and transmissive micro-optics was accepted by Optics Express.
October 10, 2021 A paper Multispectral illumination estimation using deep unrolling network was accepted by ICCV 2021.
August 11, 2021 A paper End-to-End Complex Lens Design with Differentiable Ray-Tracing was accepted by Siggraph 2021.
March 12, 2021 A paper Transfer Deep Learning for Reconfigurable Snapshot HDR Imaging Using Coded Masks was published by Computer Graphics Forum.
March 6, 2021 A paper Mask-ToF: Learning Microlens Masks for Flying Pixel Correction in Time-of-Flight Imaging was accepted by CVPR 2021.
March 3, 2021 A paper Linear Polarization Demosaicking for Monochrome and Color Polarization Focal Plane Arrays was published by Computer Graphics Forum.
February 1, 2021 A paper Robust statistical phase-diversity method for high-accuracy wavefront sensing was published by Optics and Lasers in Engineering.
December 13, 2020 A paper Upgrading the Gemini Planet Imager calibration unit with a photon counting focal plane wavefront sensor was accepted by SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, Adaptive Optics Systems VII.
December 13, 2020 A paper Optical design and preliminary results of NEW EARTH, first Canadian high-contrast imaging laboratory test bench was accepted by SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, Adaptive Optics Systems VII.
August 20, 2020 A poster Reflection Removal via Realistic Training Data Generation was accepted as a poster by SIGGRAPH 2020.
March 18, 2020 A paper Learning Rank-1 Diffractive Optics for Single-shot High Dynamic Range Imaging was accepted as an oral paper by Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020.
September 25, 2019 A paper Quantitative Phase and Intensity Microscopy Using Snapshot White Light Wavefront Sensing was accepted and published by Scientific Reports.
August 30, 2019 Two papers Reconfigurable HDR Reconfigurable Snapshot HDR Imaging Using Coded Masks and Inception Network and Polarization Demosaicking for Monochrome and Color Polarization Focal Plane Arrays were accepted by the 24th International Symposium on Vision, Modeling and Visualization (VMV 2019).
June 24, 2019 A paper A model for classical wavefront sensors and snapshot incoherent wavefront sensing was accepted and presented by OSA Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging in Munich.
March 23, 2019 A paper Compact Snapshot Hyperspectral Imaging with Diffracted Rotation was conditionally accepted by SIGGRAPH 2019.
August 15, 2018 A paper Megapixel Adaptive Optics: Towards Correcting Large-Scale Distortions in Computational Cameras was presented at SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver.
Optics Continuum Associate Editor, 2026 – Present.
SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 Technical Program Committee member.
ICCP 2026 Poster Co-Chair.
Member, CEMSE Divisional Internal Review Committee for the KAUST Global Fellowship, 2026.
SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Technical Program Committee member.
Outstanding Reviewer (Outstanding Reviewer Recognition) 2024 by Optica Publishing Group.
Reviewer for ACM SIGGRAPH 2016, SIGGRAPH 2019, SIGGRAPH 2022, SIGGRAPH 2025, SIGGRAPH 2026, SIGGRAPH Asia 2017, SIGGRAPH Asia 2023, SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, SIGGRAPH Asia 2025, SIGGRAPH Asia 2026, ACM Multimedia 2025, ACM Transactions on Graphics, ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems.
Reviewer for IEEE CVPR 2024, CVPR 2025, CVPR 2026, ICCV 2025, Transactions on Image Processing, Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Transactions on Multimedia, Transactions on Computational Imaging, Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.
Reviewer for Elsevier Computers & Graphics, Optics and Lasers in Engineering, Measurement, Expert Systems with Applications, Neurocomputing, Optics & Laser Technology, Data in Brief, Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Information Processing in Agriculture, Medical Image Analysis, Materials Science in Semiconductor Processing.
Reviewer for Optica Optics Express, Optics Letters, Applied Optics, Optics Continuum, JOSA A, Optical Materials Express, Photonics Research, Optica, Biomedical Optics Express.
Reviewer for Springer Nature Nature, Nature Communications, Communications Engineering, International Journal of Computer Vision, Computational Visual Media, Light: Advanced Manufacturing.
Reviewer for Wiley Laser & Photonics Reviews, Journal of Field Robotics.
Reviewer for IOP Publishing Inverse Problems.