The International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) has announced its 2026 IAPR Fellow list, and two professors from Beihang University have been honored with this prestigious recognition.

The IAPR Fellow is a distinguished academic honor in the field of pattern recognition, established to recognize scholars who have made outstanding scientific contributions to the field and have provided sustained service to IAPR and the international pattern recognition community. The Fellow title is awarded biennially, and according to IAPR Bylaws, the number of fellows elected must not exceed 0.25% of the total IAPR membership. In 2026, only 15 scholars worldwide received this honor.

The newly elected Beihang fellows are Professor Bai Xiao of the School of Computer Science and Engineering, recognized "for pioneering contributions to structural pattern recognition and 3D vision, and for dedicated service to the IAPR through its Technical Committees," and Professor Zhang Baochang of the School of Artificial Intelligence, recognized "for pioneering and sustained contributions to efficient representation learning for object recognition, and for service to the IAPR."

About Professor Bai Xiao

Bai Xiao is a professor and doctoral supervisor at Beihang University's School of Computer Science and Engineering. His research focuses on cutting-edge topics in vision for unmanned systems and 3D computer vision. He has published over 120 high-impact papers in leading journals and conferences including IEEE TPAMI, IJCV, CVPR, ICCV, and Acta Electronica Sinica.

His research outcomes have served major national engineering projects, providing key core technological support for China's lunar exploration, Mars exploration, and unmanned system intelligence. He has been consecutively listed in Elsevier's World's Top 2% Scientists for multiple years and has received several provincial and ministerial first-class science and technology progress awards. He has also been honored as a National Outstanding Science and Technology Worker by the China Association for Science and Technology, as well as a New Century Outstanding Talent by the Ministry of Education.

Professor Bai serves as Vice Chair of the IAPR Technical Committee, Associate Editor-in-Chief of the journal Pattern Recognition, and Area Editor of Information Fusion.

About Professor Zhang Baochang

Zhang Baochang is a professor and doctoral supervisor at Beihang University's School of Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on efficient machine learning, computer vision, and ultra-low-bit neural network processors. He has proposed the modulated perceptual computing theory based on mixed Gaussian wave functions, the modulated binary network model, and the co-gradient descent algorithm. He has published over 100 papers in top-tier conferences and journals, including 13 papers in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), with total citations exceeding 20,000. His first-author paper has garnered over 1,300 citations. He serves as an Area Chair for leading international AI conferences, including ICML, ICLR, and NeurIPS.

His modulated binary network has been deployed in mass production for the "XiaoYi XiaoYi" wake-up service, earning the Huawei Spark Award. His team has won numerous international competitions, including first place in the China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition 2025 Grand Final, the ECCV 2020 Tiny Object Detection Challenge, the ECCV 2020 COCO Object Detection Challenge, and the ICPR 2020 Fine-Grained Object Recognition Challenge.

Professor Zhang's research outcomes have powered Huawei's Bolt and Baidu's PaddlePaddle platforms, and have been selected among Beijing's first batch of typical AI application scenarios. He has been named a Highly Cited Chinese Researcher by Elsevier for five consecutive years and serves as an Academic Advisor to Baidu and an Adjunct Professor at the University at Buffalo, USA.

Editor: Lyu Xingyun