Emmy award for COST Action Chair

29/10/2019

Professor Touradj Ebrahimi, who has been involved in 5 Actions, accepted the Emmy on behalf of the JPEG Standardisation Committee. 

Professor Touradj Ebrahimi

Professor Touradj Ebrahimi receives the award on behalf of the JPEG Committee 

On 23 October 2019, The Television Academy based in Los Angeles, announced the 6 winners of the 71st Engineering Emmy Awards honouring an individual, company or organisation for developments in broadcast technology.

The Joint Photographic Experts Group, JPEG, were recognised for their ground-breaking and game-changing work of lasting value to the television industry, creating standards for still image compression and processing. The standard was introduced in 1992 by an international collegium of engineers and has been universally adopted to preserve high-quality imagery in television production and tangential workflows.

Professor Ebrahimi said of the award “This Emmy award recognises the longevity of an exceptional standard in a field which is known for its rapid pace of change in applications and their underlying technologies.”

Action participation

Professor Touradj Ebrahimi has participated in 5 COST Actions, including acting as Chair for European network on quality of experience in multimedia systems and services, Qualinet, which ran from 2010 -2014.

The goal of Qualinet was to establish a strong network on Quality of Experience with participation from both academia and industry. The Action worked to develop and promote methodologies to subjectively and objectively measure the impact in terms of quality of multimedia experience.

“Standardisation has played a central role in Qualinet and a strong liaisons with major standards active in areas relevant to Quality of Experience have been established. Examples include evaluation of the now established HEVC/H.265 for UHDTV, and next generation 3D video compression standards by MPEG and HDR image compression standard by JPEG committees where Qualinet was officially tasked to evaluate and assess proposed technologies and once selected, help in their progress towards final specifications.” Qualinet Final Report

Qualinet still continues to operate as a sustainable network; holding a yearly general assembly and approximately a dozen task forces collaborating on topics related to quality of experience in multimedia. Find out more information about their ongoing work here.