Yu-Jin ZHANG received the Ph.D. degree in Applied Science from the State University of Liège, Liège, Belgium, in 1989. From 1989 to 1993, he was post-doc fellow and research fellow at the Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. In 1993, he joined Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, where he is a professor of Image Engineering (since 1997).

He has successively opened and taught, at Tsinghua University, more than 10 undergraduate and postgraduate courses, including "image processing", "image analysis", "image understanding", "content-based visual information retrieval", etc. In Nanyang Technological University, he opened and taught a postgraduate course: "Modern Image Analysis (English)". He has compiled and published more than 30 textbooks in Chinese and English (more than 300,000 copies have been printed).

He is active in Image Engineering, with more than 500 research papers and book chapters, as well as 12 specialized books, including three monographs: "Image Segmentation" and "Content-based Visual Information Retrieval" (Science Press), and "Subspace-based Face Recognition" (Tsinghua University Press), one dictionary: "An English-Chinese Dictionary of Image Engineering" (1st edition and 2nd edition) (Tsinghua University Press), as well as three edited books: "Advances in Image and Video Segmentation" and "Semantic-Based Visual Information Retrieval" (IRM Press, USA), and "Advances in Face Image Analysis: Techniques and Technologies " (IGI Global, USA).

He was Vice President of China Society of Image and Graphics (2002 ~ 2011, 2016 ~ 2020), is the senior editor of "Journal of Image and Graphics" , associate editor of "Journal of Electronics and Information", "Journal of CAD and Computer Graphics", "Signal Processing", and "Acta Automatica Sinica". He was associate editor of "Pattern Recognition Letters", "International Journal of Image and Graphics", "Optical Engineering". He was the program chair of "The Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP'2017), the program chair of First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth International Conference on Image and Graphics (ICIG'2000, ICIG'2002, ICIG'2007, ICIG'2009, ICIG'2011, ICIG'2013, and ICIG'2015). He was the program vice chair of "IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia", 2006. 

He is a senior member of IEEE (since 1999), a Fellow of SPIE (Since 2011), and a Fellow of CSIG (Since 2019).