WNCG Prof. Alan Bovik received the 2017 Edwin H. Land Medal from The Optical Society (OSA) for shaping the direction and advancement of modern perceptual picture quality theory, and for partnering with industry towards transforming his ideas into global practice.
Given the tremendous increases in video traffic, which account for the majority of mobile data traffic, there has been a dramatic shift towards over-the-top video streaming. Due to limits on wireless network capacity, and with an increasingly knowledgeable base of consumer users demanding higher quality video display services, accounting for an end user's quality of experience (QoE) has become an essential measure of network performance. QoE refers to a viewer's holistic perception and satisfaction with a given communication network service.
An adaptive streaming system must always mediate trade-offs among a number of performance metrics, including average bitrates, bitrate variation, the frequencies and durations of re-buffering events, and startup delay. Many video streaming providers, like Netflix, are oriented towards avoiding re-buffering (or stall) events at all costs. Given the increasing demand for video streaming in mobile devices, low bandwidth conditions and small screen viewing conditions are intertwined with the standard tradeoffs between bitrate changes and re-buffering events.
Ensuring the security of public transportation portals, company facilities, and government installations has become a topic of increased concern over the past 15 years. Thus, it becomes important to develop new and diverse imaging modes capable of conducting screening and inspection processes under increasingly difficult and busy conditions, as well as to test and verify the efficacy of the new and developing imaging devices that use these diverse and various modes.
Netflix and other video content providers are tasked with delivering top-notch video quality to hundreds of millions of subscribers. As these providers continue to increase the sizes of their collection, a substantial percentage of the acquired video content will contain visual artifacts produced at the time of the video's production. These artifacts can include de-interlacing errors, up-sampling distortions, and other annoying visual defects that could greatly reduce the perceptual quality and ultimately the quality of experience of the subscriber/viewer.
Prof. Alan Bovik and his student Lark Kwon Choi in the WNCG Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) and Prof. Lawrence Cormack in the Center for Perceptual Systems (CPS) in the Department of Psychology study the influence of motion on the visibility of flicker distortions in naturalistic videos.
