Prof. Al Bovik, holder of a Cockrell Family Regents Chair in the Wireless Networking and Communication Group (WNCG) and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has received a $600,000 grant over five years from the National Institute for Standards and Technologies (NIST) to develop methodologies for testing the perceptual quality of images delivered by microwave, submillimeter wave, millimeter-wave, x-ray, infra-red, and optical imaging devices commonly deployed in security applications.
The proposed work centers on the use of new models of the statistics of real-world images, which differ with each modality, along with visual neuroscience models of image perception, to assess the visual quality of images captured using diverse radiation modalities under widely varying real-world conditions. The ultimate aim is to develop reference- and training-free perceptual image quality predictors that can be used to test the capabilities of emerging passive high-resolution imaging devices that capture images in 2-D and 3-D with varying degrees of penetration capability. Currently, no such models exist.
Prof. Bovik is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA), a Fellow of the Society of Photo-Optical and Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE), and is a member of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS). He has received many industry and academic honors including the IEEE Signal Processing Society "Society" and Technical Achievements Award, the SPIE Technology Achievement Award and the IS&T Honorary Member Award. He is also this year’s recipient of the UT-Austin Cockrell School of Engineering Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award.
He is well known for his many contributions to the fields of image and video processing, vision science, and computational vision. He has published over 750 technical articles in these areas and holds several U.S. patents. His publications have been cited about 40,000 times in the open literature, his current H-index is in the 70s, and he is listed as a Highly-Cited Researcher by Thompson Reuters, indicating one of the top 1% of most-cited researchers within the field of Engineering. He is also the author of The Handbook of Image and Video Processing, Second Edition (Elsevier Academic Press, 2005), Modern Image Quality Assessment(Morgan & Claypool, 2006), The Essential Guide to Image Processing (Elsevier Academic Press, 2009), and The Essential Guide to Video Processing (Elsevier Academic Press, 2009).