The National Science Foundation awarded $272,764 for a project entitled Quality Assessment of Natural Videos, under the direction of Dr. Alan Bovik, the Keys and Joan Curry/Cullen Trust Endowed Chair of ECE.

The goal of the project is to formulate an objective measurement of image quality and embed the quality measurement techniques into the very algorithms that process images and videos. A reliable quality metric could dynamically monitor and adjust image quality. It could also be used to optimize and benchmark algorithms and image processing systems—and ultimately, help design algorithms whose quality prediction is in good agreement with subjective scores from human observers.