ALP Seminar: Vision: A Symphony of Physics and Intelligence

Vision, as a symphony of physics and intelligence, encompasses two interconnected dimensions: sensing and perception. Visual sensing, grounded in physical optics, harnesses computational intelligence to enhance light capture. Visual perception, driven by intelligence, is now empowered by physical optics to interpret visual data with greater efficiency. This talk begins with light field meta-imaging achieving aberration-corrected sensing across a 1,100 arcseconds field-of-view on an 80-cm ground-based telescope, demonstrating how computational intelligence enhances visual sensing. It then explores photonic-domain neural networks, illustrating how physical optics synergistically advances visual perception. Together, these innovations tend to dissolve the boundaries between sensing and perception, paving the way for a neuromorphic ‘senception’ embodied vision across diverse fields such as astronomy, smart cities, and autonomous systems.

Dr. Lu FANG is is a Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on cross-disciplinary studies in computational optics and visual intelligence. Dr. Fang published over 100 peer-reviewed papers, including Science, Nature, Nature Photonics, Nature Machine Intelligence, and IEEE TPAMI etc. She received the NSFC Distinguished Young Scholar Fund, The Xplorer Prize, the MIT TR35 Innovators (China) Award, ICBS Best Paper Award, and the Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. Dr. Fang serves as an Associate Editor for Optica and IEEE TIP, and as the General Chair for IEEE MMSP 2025.