On July 1st, 2022, the 4th Person in Context (PIC) competition jointly hosted by Meitu Imaging & Vision Lab (MT Lab), Beihang University, and Renmin University of China at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM) came to a successful conclusion.

Known for its leading position and practicality, the PIC competition attracted a record number of 58 teams from renowned Chinese universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Hong Kong and University of Science and Technology of China, as well as well-known companies like Tencent, Jingdong, Xiaomi and Bilibili. The competition is divided into three different categories, covering tasks such as video grounding, video description generation, and video content spatio-temporal positioning, etc. A team jointly formed by members from the Southern University of Science and Technology, the University of Hong Kong and Tencent ARC Lab stood out to be the winner of both the "Make-up Temporal Video Grounding (MTVG)" and "Make-up Dense Video Caption (MDVC)" categories, and the winner of "Action Temporal Localization" category was a team from Sun Yat-sen University.

This year's PIC competition is held under ACM MM, the top international conference in the field of computer graphics and multimedia, and one of the Class A conferences recommended by the China Computer Society (CCF). It was initiated by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), the world's largest and most influential specialized academic organization in the field of computer that holds the Turing Award, the highest international computing award.

Since its inception, ACM MM has been committed to providing a communication platform for outstanding scholars in the field of multimedia research around the world, attracting elite participants from both academia and high-tech industry, including Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, MIT Media Lab, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. The conference offers them an opportunity to share the latest research outcomes and discuss development trends, and is therefore known as the "Olympics" in the field of multimedia technology.

This year, the PIC competition jointly held by Meitu and ACM MM paid special attention to the interpretation of human-centered video content. The three categories all focused on the problems and challenges faced in business settings. Indeed, two of the categories featured the highly popular "makeup" topic.

In recent years, with the rise of the beauty economy, consumers have been looking for a higher level of beauty, driving the beauty industry to grow rapidly. As a technology company with "beauty" at its core, Meitu has continuously empowered the beauty industry with its profound technical expertise developed over time, and is committed to providing users with a better experience of beauty. Meanwhile, it is the original intention of Meitu to realize the integration of academic research results and industrial applications. The company also hope to provide a platform for outstanding talents from Chinese and foreign universities and technology companies to exchange notes and compete with each other, and jointly explore science and technology centering AI.

As the organizer of this ACM MM 2022 competition, Meitu has always insisted on driving innovation around imaging technology and continuously increased its R&D investment. According to Meitu's 2021 financial report, its overall R&D investment has reached RMB 545.5 million, with a year-on-year increase of 35% compared to 2020. Adhering to the mission of the company to "Make beauty accessible through technology", Meitu established a core R&D department - Meitu Imaging & Vision Lab (MT Lab) in 2010, which is dedicated to research and development in artificial intelligence (AI) related fields such as computer vision, deep learning, and computer graphics, providing technical support for Meitu’s entire collection of products such as the Meitu App and BeautyCam and targeted SaaS services for the industry. It is the world's leader in technologies including face recognition, human body recognition, image recognition, image processing, image generation, AR, etc. Building on the leading imaging technology of MT Lab, Meitu continues to accelerate product upgrades based on its accurate understanding of users' needs. Meitu has established its own unique advantages in imaging product function innovation and evolution, imaging products personalization service, SaaS business and other aspects, satisfying the needs of different user groups.

Looking forward, Meitu will continue its endeavor in the beauty industry, devoting itself to the research and development of innovative technologies and breakthroughs. By actively integrating the advantages of academia and industry, Meitu will continue to make explorations in talent training, academic research, and technology research and development to facilitate faster transformation from scientific and technological achievements to applications. As the leader of continuous innovation in the imaging industry, Meitu will stick to its mission to bring users quality experience and empower the industry with technology innovation.