Professor Al Bovik recently received a $300K grant from the National Science Foundation entitled Quality Assessment of Natural Videos. The research proposed by Dr. Bovik will create powerful Video Quality Assessment (VQA) algorithms that correlate highly with human visual perception of video quality.
Digital video acquisition, networking, storage and display devices have advanced to an extraordinary degree of sophistication, leading to the rapid rise of many popular and globally deployed networked applications as Internet Video, Interactive Video on Demand (VoD), Video Telepresence, Video Phones, PDAs and other Wireless Video devices, Video Surveillance, HDTV, Digital Cinema etc.
Monitoring and controlling the quality of broadcast video streams is essential towards improving quality of service (QoS). Yet, progress in methods for performing reliable video quality analysis has remained quite limited. In this work, Dr. Bovik and his students will extend their world-leading work on (still) image quality assessment to the video domain. The expected benefits of the research are far-reaching, since successful VQA algorithms are likely to be deployed throughout the global wireline and wireless communication networks as well as in video acquisition and display devices.