HP Innovation Journal Issue 14: Spring 2020 | Page 22

Meet the Reinventor:
Dr. Qian
The HP Fellow from HP’s Artificial Intelligence
and Emerging Compute Lab is looking to deep learning
to teach computers to “see” patterns and flaws.
BY SARAH MURRY
Qian Lin can predict the future. Or, at least she can
teach computers to see it. Through her research
at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and
computer vision, she is working on innovations that help
printers correct flaws in images in real time and assist
computers to spot microscopic errors in a printhead
rolling off the assembly line. of a painting she liked. “Digital cameras were not that
advanced then,” she explains. “My photo of the painting
came out blurry. I solved the problem by taking multiple
low-light shots and then used image processing to
boost up the quality. That became the foundation for a
technology that’s become common in digital cameras.”
Qian joined HP as an intern in 1992, after completing
her PhD at Stanford University in electrical engineering,
where she developed specialized expertise in image
processing while working on a project for NASA. During
her nearly 30-year career she has been responsible for
45 filed patents and has 21 currently pending. The past decade has seen the democratization of pho-
tography through the smartphone revolution, with
more pictures taken every two minutes than were taken
throughout the entirety of the 1800s, according to some
estimates. In fact, InfoTrends predicts more than a
trillion images will be taken this year alone.
Lin has helped develop intelligent assistants for imaging
services, vision systems for print quality and 3D-part
identification, and machine learning and edge computing
solutions. With partners, she invented HP’s adaptive half-
toning technology that’s been incorporated into more than
200 million printers and has played a central role in advanc-
ing HP’s digital camera imaging pipeline. If you’ve ever had
red eyes automatically fixed in a family photo or shared a
panoramic vista from your vacation, thank Dr. Lin. “Cameras generate so much data, and a lot of times you need
immediate action and analysis from this data,” she says.
“This research area is one that I’m very passionate about,
and it’s increasingly becoming more important to HP.”
One of Lin’s early patent disclosures was inspired by a
visit to a museum, where she was trying to take a photo
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HP Innovation Journal Issue 14
DEEP LEARNING AT THE CENTER
Lin and her team were the creators of Pixel Intelligence,
a powerful portfolio of computer vision algorithms that
helps print service providers make sense of visual data.
The algorithms can find faces within an image or find the
same face in multiple images with great accuracy. They
can also recognize specific objects (such as a logo), detect
whether people are smiling or their eyes are shut, and
Photos by Jonah Podbereski