A paper by the team of Professors Shi Zhenwei and Zou Zhengxia from Beihang University's School of Astronautics has been awarded the 2026 Best Paper Award by Proceedings of the IEEE, the flagship journal of the IEEE. The paper, titled "Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey," marks the first time the award has gone to a paper with a Chinese university as the first affiliation since the prize was established.

Proceedings of the IEEE, founded in 1913, is one of the oldest and most influential flagship journals of the IEEE, with broad international reach in electronics, electrical engineering, and computer science. Its latest impact factor is 30.9.

The Best Paper Award recognizes outstanding papers published in the journal over the past three years that demonstrate broad scholarly significance and potential long-term impact, with only one paper selected each year. The selection criteria emphasize academic influence, research quality, clarity of presentation, and contributions to the field's long-term development.

The award-winning paper addresses object detection, a fundamental problem in computer vision, systematically reviewing more than two decades of technological development. It comprehensively summarizes representative methods, datasets, evaluation metrics, key technical modules, and important frontier directions, while offering a systematic outlook on future trends in object detection. Since publication, the paper has attracted widespread attention from the international academic community and has been listed by Proceedings of the IEEE as a Most Downloaded Article.

In recent years, Professors Shi Zhenwei and Zou Zhengxia's team has continued to conduct research in intelligent processing of remote sensing imagery. This award further demonstrates the team's sustained capacity for innovation and international academic influence at the interdisciplinary frontier of artificial intelligence, computer vision, and aerospace.

Editor: Lyu Xingyun