SPIE Fellow Alan Bovik of University of Texas at Austin (USA) and three colleagues have been named recipients of a 2015 Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in engineering development. The Television Academy is recognizing them for their work on video-quality prediction models, which have become standard tools to test and refine video quality throughout the global cable and satellite TV industry.
Bovik, director of the university's Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE), is being recognized with two former LIVE students, Zhou Wang and Hamid Sheikh, and collaborator Eero Simoncelli of the New York University Center for Neural Science. They developed the Structural Similarity (SSIM) Video Quality Measurement Model, an algorithm for estimating the perceived quality of an image or video that directly affects the viewing experiences of tens of millions of viewers daily.
SSIM uses neuroscience-based models of the human visual system to achieve breakthrough quality prediction performance. Unlike previous complex error models that required special hardware, it can be easily applied in real time on common processor software.
Bovik has published numerous scientific papers on image processing and visual communications, most recently as a coauthor of a paper on mobile streaming of videos at SPIE Optics + Photonics 2015. His broad and lasting contributions to the field of perception-based image processing earned him the 2013 SPIE Technology Achievement Award.
Other Engineering Emmy honorees include Mark Franken for EdiCue and SpeedTree software inventors Michael Sechrest, Chris King, and Greg Croft. Steadicam, Skycam, DiveCam and Mobycam inventor Garrett Brown received the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award, and Grass Valley USA received the Philo T. Farnsworth Award.
The awards will be made in Hollywood 28 October.
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