Fan (Aaron) Zhang

I am currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Bristol. I received my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and my Ph.D. degree from the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, supervised by Prof David Bull. As a member of Visual Information Lab and Bristol Vision Institute, my research interests lie in low-level computer vision, with a focus on video compression, perceptual quality assessment, image and video super resolution, video frame interpolation, knowledge distillation and database condensation.

I served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (2021-2024), and as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems in 2024 and Frontiers in Signal Processing in 2022. I co-organised the AIGENS workshop at IEEE/CVF ICCV 2025, and the special session “Advanced Representation Models for Image and Video Compression” at PCS 2025. I have been a review committee member (meta reviewer) of the IEEE ISCAS, and an active reviewer for leading journals including Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Access, IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. I also regularly review for major international conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, AAAI, WACV, BMVC, ICASSP, ICIP, ISCAS, ICME, VCIP, and PCS. I am currently a Senior Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.

I have won several international challenges related to video compression and quality assessment, including those at IEEE ISCAS 2025 (Neural Network-based Video Coding), IEEE MMSP 2024 (Practical End-to-end Image/Video Compression), DCC 2024 (CLIC, Learned Video Compression), IEEE/CVF WACV 2023 (HDR Video Quality Measurement), and IEEE ICIP 2017 (Video Compression).

I am a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), and a member of the Visual Signal Processing and Communications Technical Committee (VSPC TC) within the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.

Email: fan.zhang@bristol.ac.uk
Address: G.05 MVB, Woodland Road, Bristol, UK, BS8 1UB

recruitment

I am open to PhD applications for the 2026 intake. Please email me your CV. Possible funding opportunities include:

China Scholarship Council-University of Bristol PhD Scholarship (60 per year at Bristol)
University Postgraduate Research Scholarships

news

Nov 2025	I became a Senior Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT).
Oct 2025	FCVSR has been accepted by IEEE TMM.
Sep 2025	One paper has been accepted by PCS 2025: Ultra-lightweight Neural Video Representation Compression.

selected publications

Academic Press

Intelligent image and video compression: communicating pictures

David Bull and Fan Zhang

2021

DOI Bib Website

@book{bull2021intelligent,
  title = {Intelligent image and video compression: communicating pictures},
  author = {Bull, David and Zhang, Fan},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.1016/C2019-0-00641-3},
  publisher = {Academic Press}
}

TMM

BVI-DVC: a training database for deep video compression

Di Ma, Fan Zhang, and David Bull

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2021

DOI arXiv Bib Data

@article{ma2021bvi,
  title = {BVI-DVC: a training database for deep video compression},
  author = {Ma, Di and Zhang, Fan and Bull, David},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Multimedia},
  year = {2021},
  volume = {24},
  pages = {3847--3858},
  doi = {10.1109/TMM.2021.3108943},
  publisher = {IEEE}
}

TCSVT

Video compression based on spatio-temporal resolution adaptation

Mariana Afonso, Fan Zhang, and David R Bull

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2018

DOI Bib

@article{afonso2018video,
  title = {Video compression based on spatio-temporal resolution adaptation},
  author = {Afonso, Mariana and Zhang, Fan and Bull, David R},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology},
  volume = {29},
  number = {1},
  doi = {10.1109/TCSVT.2018.2878952},
  pages = {275--280},
  year = {2018},
  publisher = {IEEE}
}

NeurIPS

HiNeRV: Video Compression with Hierarchical Encoding-based Neural Representation

Ho Man Kwan, Ge Gao, Fan Zhang, Andrew Gower, and David Bull

NeurIPS, 2023

arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{kwan2023hinerv,
  title = {HiNeRV: Video Compression with Hierarchical Encoding-based Neural Representation},
  author = {Kwan, Ho Man and Gao, Ge and Zhang, Fan and Gower, Andrew and Bull, David},
  booktitle = {NeurIPS},
  volume = {36},
  year = {2023}
}

WACV

RankDVQA: Deep VQA based on ranking-inspired hybrid training

Chen Feng, Duolikun Danier, Fan Zhang, and David Bull

WACV, 2024

DOI arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{feng2024rankdvqa,
  title = {RankDVQA: Deep VQA based on ranking-inspired hybrid training},
  author = {Feng, Chen and Danier, Duolikun and Zhang, Fan and Bull, David},
  booktitle = {WACV},
  pages = {1648--1658},
  doi = {10.1109/WACV57701.2024.00167},
  year = {2024}
}

AAAI

LDMVFI: Video frame interpolation with latent diffusion models

Duolikun Danier, Fan Zhang, and David Bull

AAAI, 2024

DOI arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{danier2024ldmvfi,
  title = {LDMVFI: Video frame interpolation with latent diffusion models},
  author = {Danier, Duolikun and Zhang, Fan and Bull, David},
  booktitle = {AAAI},
  volume = {38},
  number = {2},
  doi = {10.1609/aaai.v38i2.27912},
  pages = {1472--1480},
  year = {2024}
}

ECCV

MTKD: Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for Image Super-Resolution

Yuxuan Jiang, Chen Feng, Fan Zhang, and David Bull

ECCV, 2024

DOI arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{jiang2024mtkd,
  title = {MTKD: Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for Image Super-Resolution},
  author = {Jiang, Yuxuan and Feng, Chen and Zhang, Fan and Bull, David},
  booktitle = {ECCV},
  pages = {364--382},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-72933-1_21},
  organization = {Springer}
}

CVPR

HIIF: Hierarchical encoding based implicit image function for continuous super-resolution

Yuxuan Jiang, Ho Man Kwan, Tianhao Peng, Ge Gao, Fan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zhu, Joel Sole, and David Bull

CVPR, 2025

DOI arXiv Bib Code

@inproceedings{jiang2025hiif,
  title = {HIIF: Hierarchical encoding based implicit image function for continuous super-resolution},
  author = {Jiang, Yuxuan and Kwan, Ho Man and Peng, Tianhao and Gao, Ge and Zhang, Fan and Zhu, Xiaoqing and Sole, Joel and Bull, David},
  booktitle = {CVPR},
  doi = {10.1109/CVPR52734.2025.00219},
  pages = {2289--2299},
  year = {2025}
}

ICCV

GIViC: Generative Implicit Video Compression

Ge Gao, Siyue Teng, Tianhao Peng, Fan Zhang, and David Bull

ICCV, 2025

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{gao2025givic,
  title = {GIViC: Generative Implicit Video Compression},
  author = {Gao, Ge and Teng, Siyue and Peng, Tianhao and Zhang, Fan and Bull, David},
  booktitle = {ICCV},
  year = {2025}
}

arXiv

Instance Data Condensation for Image Super-Resolution

Tianhao Peng, Ho Man Kwan, Yuxuan Jiang, Ge Gao, Fan Zhang, Xiaozhong Xu, Shan Liu, and David Bull

2025

arXiv Bib

@preprint{peng2025instance,
  title = {Instance Data Condensation for Image Super-Resolution},
  author = {Peng, Tianhao and Kwan, Ho Man and Jiang, Yuxuan and Gao, Ge and Zhang, Fan and Xu, Xiaozhong and Liu, Shan and Bull, David},
  year = {2025}
}