Alan Bovik

Alan Conrad Bovik (born June 25, 1958) is a Primetime Emmy Award-winning American engineer and vision scientist, and a Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Cockrell Family Regents Endowed Chair and is Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering(LIVE).

Life

He was educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (PhD 1984)

He has made numerous fundamental contributions to the fields of Digital Image Processing, Digital Video Processing, Digital Television, Digital Cinema, and Computational Visual Perception. He is well known for his work on image processing, low-level vision, natural scene modeling, image quality and video quality.

He has published more than 700 articles in these areas. He is also the author/editor of The Handbook of Image and Video Processing (Academic Press, 2nd edition, 2005), with Zhou Wang of Modern Image Quality Assessment (Morgan and Claypool, 2006), and he authored/edited the companion books The Essential Guide to Image Processing and The Essential Guide to Video Processing (Academic Press, 2009). His work has been cited in the scientific and engineering literature nearly 50,000 times according to Google Scholar.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, and a Fellow of the Society of Photo-Optical and Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). He received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development in 2015 (Primetime Emmy Engineering Award), for the development of video quality tools that are used throughout the Television industry. He has also received a number of major awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, including: the [1]'Society Award' (2013), the Education Award (2007); the Technical Achievement Award (2005), the Distinguished Lecturer Award (2000); and the Meritorious Service Award (1998). He also won the Society for Photo-Optical and Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Technical Achievement Award (2012) and Honorary Membership in the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) (2011). He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 2008.

He is credited with the development of order statistic filters, the image modulation model, theories of foveated image processing, and in particular image quality and video quality. His contributions include the invention or co-invention of the Emmy Award-winning Structural Similarity (SSIM) index, the MOVIE Index and the Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) index, all full reference models that predict human perception of image quality or distortion; the RRED indices, which are a family of reduced reference image and video quality prediction models, and BRISQUE, BLIINDS, DIIVINE and NIQE, which are a new breed of image and video quality prediction model that produce highly accurate predictions of human image quality judgments without the benefit of any reference information. His work in these areas has been recognized by several IEEE Signal Processing Society best journal paper awards. In practical, the SSIM, MOVIE, and RRED models have each been accorded major journal paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in recognition of their important contributions.