July 29, 2024

On July 26th, the Hubei Science and Technology Innovation Conference was held, during which the 2023 Hubei Provincial Science and Technology Awards were announced. HUST received a total of 50 awards, marking a historic high in the number of awards received. This includes one Outstanding Contribution Award, three Science and Technology Innovation Awardsfor Young Scholars, and 24projects wonFirst Prizes. HUST hasreached a new highfor three consecutive years, making HUST rankthe topoverall.

DeanBai Xiang's team from SSE has been awarded the First Prize in Natural Science for their research on “Deep Learning Methods for Scene Text Detection and Recognition”.This achievement represents a significant breakthrough in scientific and technological accomplishmentsof SSE.

Text is the most important toolfor communications among humansandcarriesinformation.The intelligent recognition of text in images and videos is a fundamental and universalAItechnology with broad application prospects. Professor Bai Xiang's teamconductssystematicresearch to exploremethods for scene text detection and recognition, proposesseveral foundational deep neural network models aimed at this task,andachievesefficient and stable text recognition that hasattractedwidespread attentionand has beenusedin both academia and industry.Paperspublished by the teamhave been cited 2,396 times in WOSCoreCollection, with the highestonecited1,144 times. Additionally, two papers have been selected as ESI Highly Cited Papers and have been cited and highly regarded by a Turing Award winner, 29 academicians from both China and abroad, and 79 IEEEfellowsandother associations.According to statistics shown onGitHub,theteam’s open-source code has been further developed by over1,000users, including more than 20businessesfrom Fortune 500 companies, and has been included and recommended by authoritative AI open-source platforms.