UT ECE Prof. Al Bovik has been named the IS&T/SPIE Imaging Scientist of the Year. Prof. Bovik was given the award for "his seminal contributions to the computational aspects of biological visual perception, specifically in the areas of image and video quality."

Dr. Bovik is the Keys and Joan Curry/Cullen Trust Endowed Chair at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Computer Sciences, and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He is the Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) in the Center for Perceptual Systems.

He is well known as the inventor or co-inventor of Order Statistic Filters; the Gabor Texture Model; the Image Modulation Model; the Structural Similarity (SSIM) and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) Indices for image quality assessment, the LIVE Image Quality Database, and SIVA - the Signal, Image and Video Audiovisual Demonstration Gallery (used by more than 300 sites around the world), as well as many other contributions to the fields of image and video processing, computational vision, digital microscopy, and modeling of biological visual perception. He has published over 450 technical articles in these areas and holds two U.S. patents. He is also the author of The Handbook of Image and Video Processing, Second Edition (Elsevier Academic Press, 2005) and of Modern Image Quality Assessment (Morgan & Claypool, 2006).

IS&T, the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, is an international non-profit dedicated to promoting the latest developments in imaging science-particularly in the areas of digital printing, electronic imaging, image perception, photo fulfillment, color imaging, image preservation, digital fabrication, and the physics and chemistry of imaging processes-through conferences, publications, and educational programs.

SPIE is an international society advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light.

Previous winners include James Janesick (designed sensors for the Hubble Space Telescope, Galileo Jupiter orbiter, Mars Orbiter, and Cassini), Thomas Huang (NAE, one of the fathers of video compression), Brian Wandell (one of the most prominent vision scientists and author of a best book); and Morley Blouke (pioneered CCD technology and has an asteroid named after him for that work).