Prof. Alan Bovik
phone: (512) 471-5370
e-mail: bovik@ece.utexas.edu
personal homepage: http://live.ece.utexas.edu/People/people_detail.php?id=97
Prof. Al Bovik is the Robert Parker Centennial Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where 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.
Research Interests
Unequal Error protection for EFIC compressed bitstream
Prof. Bovik worked on the use of turbo codes and rate compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) codes to provide unequal error protection to the Embedded Foveation Image Coding (EFIC) compressed bitstream. EFIC compressed bitstream can be useful in heterogeneous network environments where different users have different data rate requirements and hence differently compressed versions of the images can be extracted from the same bitstream by truncating the bitstream at different locations. Unequal error protection is applied to the different parts of the bitstream by protection the region around the fixation point more, and reducing the level of error protection as we move away from this region. This scheme can be useful in real time image communication applications.
Joint Space-time source-channel coding
Prof. Bovik is currently working, in collaboration with
Prof Robert Heath
, on using the space-time codes to use different levels of error protection and spatial diversity to different parts of a digital video stream. The main theme is to use some kind of tradeoff between the channel coding, spatial diversity and source coding to arrive at an optimum codeword based on the end user requirements and the fading channel characteristics. This scheme can be useful in wireless video communications.
