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[Bing Zhou]

  Bing Zhou CV

bzhousnapchat.com  Snap Research NYC Google Scholar

I'm a senior research engineer at Snap Research NYC. Before that, I was a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. My research interests are mobile sensing and computing, human computer interaction, visual recognition, augmented reality and location based services. I obtained my PhD from ECE department, Stony Brook University in 2019. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2011 and master degree from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014.

News

  • Oct 11, 2021

    New journey begins in Snap Research.

  • May 20, 2019

    Onboarding day for IBM Research.

  • Apr 19, 2019

    Sussessfully defensed my Ph.D dissertation!

  • Feb 3, 2019

    One paper is accepted to IEEE ICC'19.

  • Jan 7, 2019

    Our BatMapper extended journal version is accpeted to IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC).

  • Oct 31, 2018

    I presented at MobiCom'18, New Delhi, India.

  • Aug 13, 2018

    I presented my work "Active Visual Recognition in Augmented Reality" at IBM Research.

  • Jul 20, 2018

    Our paper EchoPrint is accepted to MobiCom'18, congrats to all co-authors!

  • Jul 2, 2018

    Our Knitter journal paper is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC).

  • May 24, 2018

    I started my summer internship at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown, NY.

  • Apr 5, 2018

    My EasyFind project won First Prize at Entrepreneur Challenge 2018 at Stony Brook University with $10,000 cash awards for turning this cool project into product.

  • Feb 16-18, 2018

    My augmented reality project EasyFind won the Finalist Prize at Hackathon@CEWIT'18 (Top 6 teams).

  • Nov 5-8, 2017

    I presented our work BatTracker at SenSys'17, Delft, The Netherlands. Unforgettable banquet!

  • Oct 16-20, 2017

    I presented our BatMapper demo at MobiCom'17, Snowbird, Utah, USA.

  • Jul 17, 2017

    Our paper on infrastructure-free mobile device tracking, BatTracker, is accepted to SenSys'17.

  • Jun 19-23, 2017

    I presented our work BatMapper at MobiSys'17, Niagara Falls, NY, USA. Breathtaking scenery!

  • May 1-4, 2017

    I'm attending IEEE INFOCOM'17 at Atlanta, GA, USA.

  • Mar 1, 2017

    Our acoustic based indoor mapping paper, BatMapper, is accepted to MobiSys'17.

  • Feb 23, 2017

    Our acoustic based indoor mapping project is awarded a Google Research Award. Thanks Google!

  • Feb 17-19, 2017

    Our wearable project Billiards Guru won the Finalist Prize at Hackathon@CEWIT'17 (Top 6 teams).

  • Jan 27, 2017

    A paper is accepted to IEEE ICC'17.

  • Nov 25, 2016

    Our paper on indoor mapping, Knitter, is accepted to INFOCOM'17.

Projects

MI-Poser: Human Body Pose Tracking Using Magnetic and Inertial Sensor Fusion with Metal Interference Mitigation

IMWUT'23

Inside-out tracking of human body poses using wearable sensors holds significant potential for AR/VR applications, such as remote communication through 3D avatars with expressive body language. Current inside-out systems often rely on vision-based methods utilizing handheld controllers or incorporating densely distributed body-worn IMU sensors. The former limits hands-free and occlusion-robust interactions, while the latter is plagued by inadequate accuracy and jittering. We introduce a novel body tracking system, MI-Poser, which employs AR glasses and two wrist-worn electromagnetic field (EMF) sensors to achieve high-fidelity upper-body pose estimation while mitigating metal interference. Our lightweight system demonstrates a minimal error (6.6 cm mean joint position error) with real-world data collected from 10 participants. It remains robust against various upper-body movements and operates efficiently at 60 Hz. Furthermore, by incorporating an IMU sensor co-located with the EMF sensor, MI-Poser presents solutions to counteract the effects of metal interference, which inherently disrupts the EMF signal during tracking. Our evaluation effectively showcases the successful detection and correction of interference using our EMF-IMU fusion approach across environments with diverse metal profiles. Ultimately, MI-Poser offers a practical pose tracking system, particularly suited for body-centric AR applications. Watch the full video here.

AO-Finger: Hands-free Fine-grained Finger Gesture Recognition via Acoustic-Optic Sensor Fusing

CHI'23

Finger gesture recognition is gaining great research interest for wearable device interactions such as smartwatches and AR/VR headsets. In this paper, we propose a hands-free fine-grained finger gesture recognition system AO-Finger based on acoustic-optic sensor fusing. Specifically, we design a wristband with a modified stethoscope microphone and two high-speed optic motion sensors to capture signals generated from finger movements. We propose a set of natural, inconspicuous and effortless micro finger gestures that can be reliably detected from the complementary signals from both sensors. We design a multi-modal CNN-Transformer model for fast gesture recognition (flick/pinch/tap), and a finger swipe contact detection model to enable fine-grained swipe gesture tracking. We built a prototype which achieves an overall accuracy of 94.83% in detecting fast gestures and enables fine-grained continuous swipe gestures tracking. AO-Finger is practical for use as a wearable device and ready to be integrated into existing wrist-worn devices such as smartwatches.

Fine-Grained Visual Recognition for AR Self-Assist Technical Support

ISMAR'20

Fine-grained visual recognition for augmented reality enables dynamic presentation of right set of visual instructions in the rightcontext by analyzing the hardware state as the repair procedure evolves. (This work is published in IEEE ISMAR'20, accepted to IEEE TVCG special issue, 18 out of 302.)

Swift Python TensorFlow iOS

Acoustic Sensing-based Gesture Detection for Wearable Device Interaction

We explore a novel method for interaction by using bone-conducted sound generated by finger movements while performing gestures. This promising technology can be deployed on existing smartwatches as a low power service at no additional cost.

Swift Python TensorFlow iOS

Active Visual Recognition in Augmented Reality

MobiCom'18 Poster

While existing visual recognition approaches, which rely on 2D images to train their underlying models, work well for object classification, recognizing the changing state of a 3D object requires addressing several additional challenges. This paper proposes an active visual recognition approach to this problem, leveraging camera pose data available on mobile devices. With this approach, the state of a 3D object, which captures its appearance changes, can be recognized in real time. Our novel approach selects informative video frames filtered by 6-DOF camera poses to train a deep learning model to recognize object state. We validate our approach through a prototype for Augmented Reality-assisted hardware maintenance.
Acknowledgement: This work was done during my internship at IBM Research.

Swift Python TensorFlow iOS

EchoPrint: Two-factor Authentication using Acoustics and Vision on Smartphones

MobiCom'18 Slides

We propose a novel user authentication system EchoPrint, which leverages acoustics and vision for secure and convenient user authentication, without requiring any special hardware. EchoPrint actively emits almost inaudible acoustic signals from the earpiece speaker to “illuminate” the user's face and authenticates the user by the unique features extracted from the echoes bouncing off the 3D facial contour. Because the echo features depend on 3D facial geometries, EchoPrint is not easily spoofed by images or videos like 2D visual face recognition systems. It needs only commodity hardware, thus avoiding the extra costs of special sensors in solutions like FaceID.

Java Python TensorFlow Android

EasyFind: Smart Device Controlled Laser Pointer for Fast Object Finding

Video Slides

EZ-Find provides a comprehensive solution for fast object finding and indoor navigation. The enabling techniques are computer vision, augmented reality and mobile computing. The fast object finding feature enables instant object identification from clutters (e.g., a book/medicine from shelf). Indoor navigation is the essential for indoor LBS, and will provide great convenience to people, especially in large scale public places such as airports and train stations.

Swift Python Raspberry Pi iOS

BatTracker: High Precision Infrastructure-free Mobile Device Tracking in Indoor Environments

[CCM]

SenSys'17 Slides

We propose BatTracker, which incorporates inertial and acoustic data for robust, high precision and infrastructure-free tracking in indoor environments. BatTracker leverages echoes from nearby objects and uses distance measurements from them to correct error accumulation in inertial based device position prediction. It incorporates Doppler shifts and echo amplitudes to reliably identify the association between echoes and objects despite noisy signals from multi-path reflection and cluttered environment. A probabilistic algorithm creates, prunes and evolves multiple hypotheses based on measurement evidences to accommodate uncertainty in device position. Experiments in real environments show that BatTracker can track a mobile device's movements in 3D space at sub-cm level accuracy, comparable to the state-of-the-art infrastructure based approaches, while eliminating the needs of any additional hardware.

Java Python Android

BatMapper: Acoustic Sensing Based Indoor Floor Plan Construction Using Smartphones

1 min Video MobiSys'17 TMC'19 Slides

In this project, we propose BatMapper, which explores a previously untapped sensing modality - acoustics - for fast, fine grained and low cost floor plan construction. We design sound signals suitable for heterogeneous microphones on commodity smartphones, and acoustic signal processing techniques to produce accurate distance measurements to nearby objects. We further develop robust probabilistic echo-object association, recursive outlier removal and probabilistic resampling algorithms to identify the correspondence between distances and objects, thus the geometry of corridors and rooms. We compensate minute hand sway movements to identify small surface recessions, thus detecting doors automatically.

Java Python MATLAB Android

Knitter: Fast, Resilient Single-User Indoor Floor Plan Construction

[CCM]

INFOCOM'17 TMC'18 Slides

Lacking of floor plans is a fundamental obstacle to ubiquitous indoor location-based services. Recent work have made significant progress to accuracy, but they largely rely on slow crowdsensing that may take weeks or even months to collect enough data. In this paper, we propose Knitter that can generate accurate floor maps by a single random user’s one hour data collection efforts, and demonstrate how such maps can be used for indoor navigation. Knitter extracts high quality floor layout information from single images, calibrates user trajectories and filters outliers. It uses a multi-hypothesis map fusion framework that updates landmark positions/orientations and accessible areas incrementally according to evidences from each measurement.

Java Swift MATLAB Android iOS

Publications

IMWUT'23
MI-Poser: Human Body Pose Tracking using Magnetic and Inertial Sensor Fusion with Metal Interference Mitigation.
Riku Arakawa, Bing Zhou*, Gurunandan Krishnan, Mayank Goel, and Shree Nayar
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. [* Corresponding author]
[PDF]
IMWUT'23
N-euro Predictor: A Neural Network Approach for Smoothing and Predicting Motion Trajectory.
Qijia Shao, Jian Wang, Bing Zhou, Vu An Tran, Gurunandan Krishnan and Shree Nayar
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.
[PDF]
CHI'23
AO-Finger: Hands-free Fine-grained Finger Gesture Recognition via Acoustic-Optic Sensor Fusing.
Chenhan Xu, Bing Zhou*, Gurunandan Krishnan and Shree Nayar
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [* Corresponding author]
[PDF]
HEALTH'22
Passive and Context-Aware In-Home Vital Signs Monitoring Using Co-Located UWB-Depth Sensor Fusion.
Zongxing Xie, Bing Zhou, Xi Cheng, Elinor Schoenfeld and Fan Ye
ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare.

[PDF]
ICHI'21
VitalHub: robust, non-touch multi-user vital signs monitoring using depth camera-aided UWB.
Zongxing Xie, Bing Zhou, Xi Cheng, Elinor Schoenfeld and Fan Ye
2021 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI).

[ Best Paper Award ]

[PDF]
ACM-BCB'21
Signal quality detection towards practical non-touch vital sign monitoring.
Zongxing Xie, Bing Zhou, Fan Ye
Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics.

[ Best Student Paper ]

[PDF]
TMC'21
Robust human face authentication leveraging acoustic sensing on smartphones.
Bing Zhou, Zongxing Xie, Yinuo Zhang, Jay Lohokare, Ruipeng Gao, and Fan Ye
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.
[PDF]
ISMAR'20
Fine-grained visual recognition in mobile augmented reality for technical support.
Bing Zhou, Sinem Guven Kaya
IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

[ Accepted to IEEE TVCG special issue, 18 out of 302, Acceptance rate 6%. ]

[PDF]
ICC'19
Multi-Modal Face Authentication using Deep Visual and Acoustic Features
Bing Zhou, Zongxing Xie, Fan Ye
IEEE International Conference on Communications.
[PDF]
TMC'19
Towards Scalable Indoor Map Construction and Refinement using Acoustics on Smartphones
Bing Zhou, Mohammed Elbadry, Ruipeng Gao, Fan Ye
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.
[PDF]
MobiCom'18
EchoPrint: Two-factor Authentication using Vision and Acoustics on Smartphones
Bing Zhou, Jay Lohokare, Ruipeng Gao, Fan Ye
[PDF]
MobiCom'18 (Poster)
Pose-assisted Active Visual Recognition in Mobile Augmented Reality
Bing Zhou, Sinem Guven, Shu Tao, Fan Ye
[PDF]
MobiCom'18 (Poster)
A Raspberry Pi Based Data-Centric MAC for Robust Multicast in Vehicular Network
Mohammed Elbadry, Bing Zhou, Fan Ye, Peter Milder, YuanYuan Yang
[PDF]
TMC'18
Fast and Resilient Indoor Floor Plan Construction with a Single User
Ruipeng Gao, Bing Zhou, Fan Ye, Yizhou Wang
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.
[PDF]
SenSys'17
BatTracker: High Precision Infrastructure-free Mobile Device Tracking in Indoor Environments
Bing Zhou, Mohammed Salah, Ruipeng Gao, Fan Ye
[PDF]
MobiCom'17 (Demo)
Demo: Acoustic Sensing Based Indoor Floor Plan Construction Using Smartphones
Bing Zhou, Mohammed Salah, Ruipeng Gao, Fan Ye
[PDF]
MobiSys'17
BatMapper: Acoustic Sensing Based Indoor Floor Plan Construction Using Smartphones
Bing Zhou, Mohammed Salah, Ruipeng Gao, Fan Ye
[PDF]
ICC'17
Explore hidden information for indoor floor plan construction
Bing Zhou, Fan Ye
[PDF]
INFOCOM'17
Knitter: Fast, Resilient Single-User Indoor Floor Plan Construction
Ruipeng Gao (co-primary), Bing Zhou (co-primary), Fan Ye, Yizhou Wang
[PDF]
Others
For full publication lists, please refer to my Google Scholar.

Work Experience

Senior Research Engineer Oct 2021 - Present

Research Staff Member May 2019 - Oct 2021

Research Intern Summer 2018

Stony Brook University

Teaching Assistant Fall 2014-Spring 2015