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 Colorado Boulder where he holds the Provost’s Chair in Engineering. He is a faculty member in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering (ECEE) and is Director of Colorado’s Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE). Previously he was a professor at The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), where he held the Cockrell Family Regents Endowed Chair in the Cockrell School of Engineering.

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.”

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 1000 technical articles, books, and patents 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 175,000 times according to Google Scholar. He is one of the most highly cited engineers in the world according to the Web of Science.

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 foreign member of Academia Europaea (2023). 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, the FUNQUE family of video quality models, 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 using reference information. His high-dynamic range (HDR) add-on model HDRMAX, which improves the quality prediction performance of leading models is marketed and used worldwide. His picture and video quality models SSIM, MS-SSIM, VIF, VMAF, MOVIE, BRISQUE, FUNQUE, NIQE, ChipQA, and HDRMAX 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.^{[citation needed]}

He was 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 70 PhD graduates, more than 50 master's degree recipients, and more than two dozen post-doctoral researchers.