Alan Bovik

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

He is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), where he holds the Cockrell Family Regents Endowed Chair in the Cockrell School of Engineering 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, the Machine Learning Laboratory, the Institute for Neuroscience, and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group.

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 television, digital image processing, digital video processing, 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.

He has published more than 900 articles and books in these areas.

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.

Bovik has received a number of major international awards.

These include:

In addition he has been recognized by the following honors:

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 160,000 times according to Google Scholar.

He is one of the most highly cited engineers in the world according to the Web of Science.

Professor Bovik is an elected member of the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE), an elected Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), an elected Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, and an elected member of Academia Europaea.

He is also a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of Optica and of the Society of Photo-Optical and Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE), an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (HonFRPS) and an Honorary Member of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T).

He is a voting member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (Television Academy) and was named an inaugural member of its Science and Technology Peer Group.

He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign 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 for widely used and disseminated image quality and video quality computational models and measurement tools that are used throughout the television, cinematic, streaming video, and social media industries.

His contributions include the invention or co-invention of the Emmy Award-winning Structural Similarity (SSIM) video quality measurement tool, the MOVIE Index, the Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) algorithms, and his extensive contributions to the Emmy Award-winning VMAF system, 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, NIQE, and ChipQA, which are a new breed of image and video quality prediction models 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, VMAF, MOVIE, BRISQUE, NIQE, and ChipQA currently process a significant percentage of all bits transmitted both in the United States as well as globally, and are implemented in commercial cable, satellite, broadcast, streaming video, television, home cinema / disc, and social media quality monitoring and control workflows around the world.

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 and was its longest-serving Editor-in-Chief, with a tenure of six years.

Bovik's academic legacy includes serving as the supervising professor of more than 60 PhD graduates, more than 50 master's degree recipients, and more than two dozen post-doctoral researchers.

Bovik received a Primetime Emmy Award in 2015 for his development of perception-based video quality measurement tools that are now standards in television production.

He also received a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award in 2021 for the “development of perceptual metrics for video encoding optimization.”