Research Associate in Deep Video Quality Assessment

The role

Bristol is acknowledged as a leading centre for the creative industries globally, with the University of Bristol providing its strategic and research leadership. The ongoing MyWorld research programme, led by the University of Bristol, builds on the strengths of this regional cluster and on its international connectivity. This role will work on the specific project “Towards Robust and Generic Video Quality Assessment based on Perception-inspired Foundation Models”, which is funded by our collaborator, Video Quality Analysis Team with Amazon Prime Video, in London, UK.

Video streaming services are becoming more and more popular with increases in the number of subscribers driven by the diversity and quality of available content. The streaming pipeline for professionally generated content comprises multiple stages including acquisition, post-production, encoding, transmission, and presentation; each of these can introduce visual artifacts, resulting in reduced quality of experience. To deliver an optimal user experience, it is important to identify and locate these artifacts to accurately monitor the streaming quality.

In this context, this post, will be appointed at a Research Associate level and will be expected to carry out internationally-leading research in the area of Learning-based perceptual quality assessment, to develop a robust and generic deep video quality assessment frame work that is capable of accurately assessing overall visual quality and detecting different visible artifacts in streamed videos with various types of content and formats.

What will you be doing?

Research Responsibilities

The role will:

• Perform subjective experiments to collect subjective quality scores.
• Develop new deep learning based video quality models. 
• Document the work carried out and publish findings in the high impact journal and international conferences.

Administration Responsibilities

The post holder will be expected to contribute to the organisation of activities and reporting and facilitate the communication with our collaborators.

You should apply if

Essential

• A strong research track record in image processing; and/or in machine learning with particular application to video quality assessment and/or video compression problems and an ability to innovate
• Proven research experience in image processing and in machine learning and/or related areas.
• Strong project management and communication skills.
• A commitment to share knowledge in an enthusiastic and effective manner.

Desirable

• A Proven ability to publish papers in top venues relevant to the area of research.
• A strong working knowledge of programming languages, particularly C and Python.
• Experience with applying (deep) machine methods to visual data and applications.
• Experience in delivering successful research projects.
• Experience with perceptual video quality assessment.
• A proven track record of collaborating with both academic and industrial partners.

Additional information

For informal queries, please contact: Dr Aaron Zhang, fan.zhang@bristol.ac.uk

To find out more about what it's like to work in the Faculty of Engineering, and how the Faculty supports people to achieve their potential, please see our staff blog:

https://engineering.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/category/engineering-includes-me/

Contract type: Open ended with fixed funding for a year (with possible extension to up to three years)

This advert will close at 23:59 UK time on 23rd April 2025.

Interviews are expected to take place on 15th May 2025.

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