Quick Facts
Biography
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 (UT-Austin), where he holds the Cockrell Family Regents Endowed Chair and is Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering(LIVE). He is a faculty member in the UT-Austin Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (UT ECE), the Institute for Neuroscience (INS), and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG).
Work
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 800 books and 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). Overall, his work has been cited in the scientific and engineering literature more than 60,000 times according to Google Scholar. He is one of the most highly cited engineers in the world (top 1%) according to Thomson-Reuters.
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) from the Television Academy, for the development of video quality measurement tools that are used throughout the global broadcast, cable, and satellite Television industry. 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, computational modeling of visual texture perception, theories of foveated image processing, and in particular advanced, widely disseminated image quality and video quality measurement tools that are used throughout the television and cinematic industries. His contributions include the invention or co-invention of the Emmy Award-winning Structural Similarity (SSIM) video quality measurement tool, the MOVIE Index and the Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) algorithms, all 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 accurate predictions of human judgments of picture quality without the benefit of any reference information.
Service to the Profession
He served as the Founder and First General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP). He also co-founded (with David Munson, Jr.) the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP) and remains as its longest-serving Editor-in-Chief with a tenure of six years.
Educational Activities
He has created widely used, adopted, and cited books and online courseware, including The Handbook of Image and Video Processing (Academic Press, 2000, 2005), Modern Image Quality Assessment (Morgan & Claypool, 2006), The Essential Guide to Image Processing (Academic Press, 2009), and The Essential Guide to Video Processing (Elsevier Academic Press, 2009). His award-winning online courseware is used internationally: SIVA – Courseware for Signal, Image, Video and Audio Processing. This online courseware offers broad, deep online curricula for Digital Image and Video Processing and Digital Signal Processing. SIVA includes hundreds of Signal, Image and Video Processing demonstrations delivering live, interactive audio-visual experiences of signal and image processing algorithms.
Awards
2015 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development
2013 IEEE Signal Processing Society 'Society' Award
2007 IEEE Signal Processing Society Education Award
2005 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award
2000 IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer Award
1997 IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award
2012 SPIE Technology Achievement Award
2013 IS&T Honorary Member Award
2010 IS&T/SPIE Imaging Scientist of the Year
2009 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award
2013 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (co-author)
2013 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award
2017 IEEE Signal Processing Society Sustained Impact Paper Award
2016 IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award
2009 The University of Texas at Austin Hocott Distinguished Centennial Engineering Research Award
2016 The University of Texas at Austin Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award