The Team led by Prof Chaoliang Tan and Prof Andy Chan having Paper Published in Top Journal – Nature Communications

Prof Chaoliang Tan (Associate Professor of EE), Prof Andy Chan (Associate Professor of EE), Dr Jiajia Zha (Postdoc), Mr Haoxin Huang (PhD student), and Dr Yunpeng Xia (PhD graduate 2024), have published a paper in the top journal – Nature Communications, on 24 April 2025. The paper titled “In-sensor compressing via programmable optoelectronic sensors based on van der Waals heterostructures for intelligent machine vision” is a collaborative work with scholars coming from CHEM and MSE Department of CityUHK, The University of Hong Kong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Shenzhen University, and Shenzhen Technology University.

This Nature Communications paper can be found at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59104-7. To give you a glimpse of the research work, here is a quote from the abstract: 

Here we demonstrate a programmable two-dimensional (2D) heterostructure-based optoelectronic sensor integrating sensing, memory, and computation for in-sensor data compression. Our 2D sensor captured and memorized/encoded optical signals, leading to in-device snapshot compression of dynamic videos and three-dimensional spectral data with a compression ratio of 8:1. The reconstruction quality, indicated by a peak signal-to-noise ratio value of 15.81 dB, is comparable to the 16.21 dB achieved through software. Meanwhile, the compressed action videos (in the form of 2D images) preserve all semantic information and can be accurately classified using in-sensor convolution without decompression, achieving accuracy on par with uncompressed videos (93.18% vs 83.43%). Our 2D optoelectronic sensors promote the development of efficient intelligent vision systems at the edge.