Prof. Al Bovik of Texas ECE and his former students Anish Mittal and Rajiv Soundararajan have received the 2017 Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award for their paper " “Making a “Completely Blind” Image Quality Analyzer” first published in IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Volume 20, No. 3, March 2013. Prof. Bovik and his students will receive the award at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Calgary in April 2018.

The IEEE's first society, the Signal Processing Society is "the world’s premier professional society for signal processing scientists and professionals since 1948." The award goes to a "letter article of exceptional merit and broad interest on a subject related to the Society's technical scope and appearing in the IEEE Signal Processing Letters."

Prof. Al Bovik holds the Cockrell Family Endowed Regents Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE). Dr. Bovik received Television’s highest honor, an individual Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (The Television Academy) in October 2015, for his work on the development of video quality prediction models which have become standard tools in broadcast and post-production houses throughout the television industry. He has published over 750 technical articles in these areas and holds several U.S. patents. His publications have been cited more than 45,000 times in the literature, his current H-index is about 75, and he is listed as a Highly-Cited Researcher by Thompson Reuters. His several books include the companion volumes The Essential Guides to Image and Video Processing (Academic Press, 2009).

Anish Mittal is a Lead Research Engineer at HERE in Berkely, California. He received his PhD from Texas ECE in 2013 under Dr. Bovik's supervision.

Rajiv Soundararajan is an Assistant professor in the Departmenr of Electrical Communicatio Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. he received his PhD from Texas ECE in 2012 and was co-supervised by Prof. Bovik and Prof. Sriram Vishwanath.