Professor Bovik and Others Receive NSF Grant

Dr. Alan C. Bovik, WNCG professor, and Drs. Larry Cormack, Bill Geisler and Eyal Seidemann, professors in the department of Psychology, recently received $1.2 million from the National Science Foundation to develop a visual search system capable of finding objects in cluttered environments.

The group, all of whom are members of UT-Austin’s internationally-recognized Center for Perceptual Systems, is investigating theoretical, neurobiological, psychophysical, and engineering aspects of efficient visual search mechanisms in humans. By analyzing the statistics of natural images that attract gaze, the team will statistically quantify the influence of fundamental low-level image features such as contrast, motion, stereo, and color in drawing visual attention. Eventually, the group will create mathematical algorithms for use in software, and build companion hardware capable of visually searching like humans, which can then be used in the deployment of automated agents capable of performing such complicated tasks as robotic navigation, security imaging, automatic pictorial database query, image understanding, and automated visual search in, for example, cancer detection, autonomous vehicle navigation, and battlefield reconnaissance by unmanned combat aircraft vehicles, among many others.

Alan C. Bovik is the Cullen Trust for Higher Education Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and in addition to his activities in WNCG, he is the Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) in the Center for Perceptual Systems. Dr. Bovik is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Texas and is a frequent consultant to legal, industrial and academic institutions. During the spring of 1992, he held a visiting position in the Division of Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was the Founding General Chairman of the First IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, held in Austin, Texas, in November, 1994.