1. Introduction

Alan Conrad Bovik (born June 25, 1958) is an American engineer and vision scientist. He is 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).

Bovik won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2015 for his development of video quality measurement tools that are now standards in television production.^[1][2][3][4]

2. Work

Al Bovik was educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (PhD 1984). He has made numerous fundamental contributions to the fields of digital photography, digital image processing, digital video processing, digital television, digital cinema, and computational visual perception. He is particularly well known for his work on low-level vision, natural scene modeling, image quality, and video quality.^[5]

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 the author/editor of 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 75,000 times according to Google Scholar.^[6] He is one of the most highly cited engineers in the world (top 1%) according to Thomson-Reuters.^[7]

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, The Optical Society,^[8] and the Society of Photo-Optical and Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). He will receive the 2019 IEEE Fourier Award "For seminal contributions and high-impact innovations to the theory and application of perception-based image and video processing."^[9] He received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development in 2015^[4] (Primetime Emmy Engineering Award) from the Television Academy, for the development of video quality measurement tools that are used throughout the global broadcast, cable, streaming/internet and satellite television industries. He also received the 2017 Edwin H. Land Medal^[10] "For substantially shaping the direction and advancement of modern perceptual picture quality theory, 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.^[8]

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 for widely used and disseminated image quality and video quality computational models and 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. His picture and video quality models SSIM, MS-SSIM, VIF, MOVIE, and NIQE currently process a significant percentage of all bits transmitted in the US, and are implemented in commercial cable, satellite, broadcast, and streaming internet video quality monitoring and control systems around the world.

3. 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.

4. Educational Activities

Bovik's academic legacy includes serving as the supervising professor of more than 50 PhD graduates, more than 50 master's degree recipients, and more than a dozen post-doctoral researchers.

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] –^[11] 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.

5. Awards

• 1997: Leo L. Beranek Meritorious Service Award^[12] of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
• 2000: IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer Award
• 2000: IEEE Third Millennium Medal^[13]
• 2005: Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award^[14] of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
• 2007: Carl Friedrich Gauss Education Award^[15] of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
• 2008: Distinguished Alumnus Award, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign^[16]
• 2009: IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award^[17]
• 2009: The University of Texas at Austin Hocott Distinguished Centennial Engineering Research Award^[18]
• 2010: IS&T/SPIE Imaging Scientist of the Year^[19]
• 2012: SPIE Technology Achievement Award^[20]
• 2013: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award^[21]
• 2013: Norbert Wiener Society Award^[22] of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
• 2013: IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (co-author)^[23]
• 2013: IS&T Honorary Member Award^[24]
• 2015: Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development^[4]
• 2016: IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award^[25]
• 2016: The University of Texas at Austin Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award^[26]
• 2017: Edwin H. Land Medal^[10] from The Optical Society and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology
• 2017: Google Scholar Classic Paper in the area Signal Processing^[27]
• 2017: Google Scholar Classic Paper in the area Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition^[28]
• 2017: IEEE Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award^[29]
• 2017: IEEE Signal Processing Society Sustained Impact Paper Award^[30]
• 2018: EURASIP Best Paper Award^[31]
• 2018: Picture Coding Symposium Best Paper Award
• 2019: IEEE Fourier Award^[32]