According to Google scholar, the following paper coauthored by research professor Lu Cewu, becomes the most cited paper among 1000+ SIGGRAPH (A class) paper in recent 5 years.

Image smoothing via L 0 gradient minimization
Lu Xu*, Cewu Lu*, Yi Xu, Jiaya Jia (* indicates co-first author)
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 30 (6), 174

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=zh-CN&view_op=list_hcore&venue=eq0ghEO5jswJ.2016

Dr. Lu Cewu is the faculty of our department and the co-first author of this paper. Since all SIGGRAPH papers are published in ACM trans. on Graphic (IF = 4.09), this paper is also the recent 5 years most cited paper in this journal. This paper proposes a new L0-norm minimization based image principal structure extractor (See Figure 1). It is widely used in many applications, such as crowd analysis (see Figure 2) and saliency detection (See Figure 3).

Figure 1. input image and its principal structure.

Some Applications: 

Figure 2. Crowd Analysis [TPAMI 2016]                           

Figure 3. Saliency Detection [CVPR 2013].