Alan Bovik

Work

Bovik 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.

Bovik 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.

Bovik is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of The Optical Society, 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 also received the 2017 Edwin H. Land Medal "For substantially shaping the direction and advancement of modern perceptual picture quality computation, and for energetically engaging industry to transform his ideas into global practice." He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 2008.

Bovik 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

Bovik 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

Bovik 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
2017 Edwin H. Land Medal from The Optical Society and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology
2000 IEEE Third Millenium Medal
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
2017 Google Scholar Classic Paper in the area Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition
2017 Google Scholar Classic Paper in the area Signal Processing
2008 Distinguished Alumnus Award, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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