Derek Pang

Email: dcypang@alumni.stanford.edu 

Updated: February 2024.

About Me

Derek Pang is currently a Tech Lead Manager at Google, working on Pixel HDR+ with focus on computational photography and on-device machine learning. He helped the team ship various photo processing features, including Night Sight, 50MP high-resolution mode, UltraHDR, VideoBoost, Panorama, and ML denoise/deblur.

Prior to Pixel Camera, he led a collaboration with Google DeepMind on  learning-to-encode  as part of the YouTube Media Algorithm team. Prior to joining Google, he was Video Architect at Lytro, where he worked on numerous inventions in video compression and streaming to enable cinematic light field VR content delivery. From 2012 to 2015, he was a founding member of Highfive Technologies and designed one of the first WebRTC cloud-based video conferencing systems for the enterprise market.

Derek earned his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. His research interests included computational photography,  on-device ML, multiview and video compression. During his PhD candidacy at Stanford, he co-developed ClassX, an open source interactive video streaming system aimed at reducing the cost of capturing and publishing educational videos.

[Resume] [Google Scholar] [Linkedin]

Projects

Pixel 7 Pro to 9 Pro, Foldable, A-series

Launched numerous HDR+ processing innovations that:

Our team effort enabled Pixel devices to be best-in-class in photo IQ in their respective market segments: 



MuZero with Self-competition for Rate Control in

VP9 Video Compression


[PDF] [BBC, Fortune

Google Pixel 3 & Pixel 4

The winner of Innovation of the Year Award in 2018 and 2019 from DPReview. My contribution on Pixel 3 included:

Lytro Immerge / 6-DoF Video Codec

World's First Volumetric Cinematic VR system using light field technology. Developed a proprietary 6-DoF video codec that reduces data rate by more than 250x, while maintaining real-time 90fps playback performance. Our Lytro Immerge system has won: "Technology Awards for outstanding achievement in Entertainment Arts and Technologies" from Advanced Imaging Society in 2018. 

[Wired] [VR Capture Format] [Hallelujah in VR] [SIGGRAPH] [Patents]

Highfive Cloud-Based Video Conferencing

An easy-to-use, affordable conferencing solution that has helped more than 1,400 businesses and served over one million call minutes per week in its first year of launch. Technical work included proprietary rate control, multiparty simulcast, burst lost resilient forward error correction, error concealment, jitter buffer and cross-platform media pipeline. 

[Wired] [Bloomberg] [The Verge] [MarketWired] [Redot Design Award Winner 2015]

ClassX Open Source Project 

An open-source interactive video streaming project in online education. A precursor technology to tiled 360/VR streaming.

[Source] [Paper] [Stanford News, Stanford Daily, ACM TechNews]

Publications

Patents