• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.64-70
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• 2008

The H.264 standard is widely used due to the high compression rate and quality. The deblocking filter of the H.264 standard improves the quality of images by eliminating blocking artifacts of pictures, and it requires a lot of computation. We propose a new hardware architecture for the deblocking filter with pipelined architecture, 1-D filters which support both horizontal and vertical filtering and efficient memory management. Four memory blocks are configured for the efficient storage and access of the current macroblock and adjacent referenced sub-macroblocks, and the pixel data from the motion compensation unit can be transferred without waiting during the computation cycles of the deblocking filter. The number of computation cycles and the hardware area are reduced using the proposed architecture, and the performance of the H.264 decoder is improved. We design the deblocking filter using Verilog-HDL and implement using an FPGA. The designed deblocking filter can be used for decoding HD quality images at 77 MHz.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.96-104
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a no-reference objective Quality assessment metrics of image. The blockiness and blurring of edge areas which are sensitive to the human visual system are modeled as step functions. Blocking and blur metrics are obtained by estimating local visibility of blockiness and edge width, For the blocking metric, horizontal and vertical blocking lines are first determined by accumulating weighted differences of adjacent pixels and then the local visibility of blockiness at the intersection of blocking lines is obtained from the total difference of amplitudes of the 2-D step function which is modelled as a blocking region. The blurred input image is first re-blurred by a Gaussian blur kernel and an edge mask image is generated. In edge blocks, the local edge width is calculated from four directional projections (horizontal, vertical and two diagonal directions) using local extrema positions. In addition, the kurtosis and SSIM are used to compute the blur metric. The final no-reference objective metric is computed after those values are combined using an appropriate function. Experimental results show that the proposed objective metrics are highly correlated to the subjective data.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2005.07a
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• pp.598-600
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• 2005

본 논문은 MPEG-4 기반의 모바일 비디오 서비스 환경에서 발생하는 화질열화 현상의 하나인 블륵킹 현상을 제거하는 기법을 제안한다. 제안된 기법은 전처리 과정과 3가지 모드의 디블록킹 필터 및 후처리 과정으로 구성되어 있으며 각 모드는 블록경계의 특성에 따라 적용된다. 모드 1은 블록경계의 양쪽 모두가 평탄한 경우에 해당하며 가장 강한 필터를 적용한다. 모드 2는 블록경계의 한쪽만 평탄한 경우이고 이때는 비대칭 필터를 적용한다. 모드 3은 블록경계를 중심으로 양쪽 모두 복잡한 경우이고, 이 경우에는 블록경계의 주파수 특성을 고려하여 화소값을 보정한다. 전처리 과정에서는 각 필터의 모드를 올바르게 선택하도록 블록 내부의 불필요한 신호를 제거하고, 후처리 과정에서는 대각선 에지와 블록의 모서리가 만나는 경우 발생하는 corner outlier를 제거하여 주관적 화질을 향상시킨다. 실험결과에서 제안한 방법이 PSNR 관점에서 후처리 과정을 거치지 않는 비디오의 경우와 비교하여 약 0.7dB, MPEG-4 디블록킹 결과와 비교하여 약 0.4dB 향상됨을 보인다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2011.10a
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• pp.930-933
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• 2011

This paper addresses an adaptive postprocessing method applied in the spatial domain for block-based discrete cosine transform (BDCT) coded images. The proposed algorithm is designed by a serial concatenation of a 1D simple smoothing filter and a 2D directional filter. The 1D smoothing filter is applied according to the block type, which is determined by an adaptive threshold. It depends on local statistical properties, and updates block types appropriately by a simple rule, which affects the performance of deblocking processes. In addition, the 2D directional filter is introduced to suppress the ringing effects at the sharp edges and the block discontinuities while preserving true edges and textural information. Comprehensive experiments indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms many deblocking methods in the literature, in terms of PSNR and subjective visual quality evaluated by GBIM.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.7
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• pp.52-60
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• 2008

The deblocking filter in the H.264/AVC video coding standard helps to reduce the blocking artifacts produced in the decoding process. But it consumes one third of the computational complexity in H.624/AVC decoder, which advocates an efficient design of a hardware accelerator for filtering. This paper proposes an architecture of deblocking filter using two filters and some registers for data reuse. Our architecture improves the throughput and minimize the number of external memory access by increasing data reuse. After initialization, two filters are able to perform filtering operation simultaneously. It takes only 96 clocks to complete filtering for one macroblock. We design and synthesis our architecture using Dongbuanam $0.18{\mu}m$ standard cell library and the maximum clock frequency is 200MHz.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2008.10b
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• pp.306-307
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• 2008

본 논문에서는 제한적인 자원이 할당된 모바일 환경에서 블록기반의 압축방식을 사용하여 영상을 복원할 때에 나타나는 블록화 연상을 제거하기 위해 효율적인 실시간 후처리 기법을 제안한다. 제안하는 후처리 기법은 영상에 존재하는 블록화 현상으로 인해 나타나는 다양한 인공물에 대해 디블록킹 필터링와 방향성 필터링를 적용하여 효율적으로 블록화 현상을 제거한다. 후처리 과정 중 영상에 존재하는 고유의 고주파 성분과 인공물로 인한 고주파 성분을 구분하여, 필더링 과정으로 고유의 고주파 성분이 함께 제거되지 않도록 보호해준다. 다양한 영상을 통해 본 논문에서 제안한 후처리 기법과 기존에 알려진 후처리 기법들을 비교하는 실험을 하였고, 도출된 실험 결과를 객관적인 지표로 제시하여 제안하는 기법의 우수함을 입증하였다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2007.06d
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• pp.555-559
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• 2007

국제 비디오 압축 표준인 H.264/AVC는 MPEG-2나 MPEG-4등에 비해 압축률이 2배 이상 향상되어 저대역폭을 가지는 모바일 단말기 기반의 네트워크에서도 이전의 압축표준보다 훨씬 좋은 품질의 영상을 제공하나 높아진 압축률에 상응하여 복잡도 또한 증가하였다. 이러한 복잡도를 해결하기 위하여 디코딩을 하는 과정에서 병목현상을 일으키는 부분들을 하드웨어의 최적화된 설계로 해결해왔다. 이러한 하드웨어 기반 해결은 단말기의 교체라는 단점을 가지고 있다. 이러한 단점을 해결하기 위하여 본 논문에서는 소프트웨어 디코더가 모바일 단말기에 적용되기 위한 조건들을 살펴보고 디코딩 과정 중에 가장 많은 병목 현상을 가지는 디블록킹 필터(De-Blocking Filter)를 모바일 단말기에 적용하기 위한 방법을 제안한다. 이러한 시도는 모바일 단말기 상에서 하드웨어 기반 디코더가 아닌 소프트웨어 기반 디코더가 구현 될 수 있는 기초가 된다.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.513-526
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a de-blocking filter for improvement of coding efficiency and computational complexity reduction on a high definition video coding. Recently, the H.264/AVC standard-based research for high definition video coding method is under way because the amount of used of high definition videos is on the increase. The H.264/AVC de-blocking filter is designed for low bitrate video coding and it improves not only the subjective quality but also coding efficiency by minimizing the blocking artifact. However, the H.264/AVC de-blocking filter that strong filtering is performed is not suitable in a high definition video coding which occurs relatively low blocking artifact. Also, the conventional de-blocking filter has high computational complexity in decoder side. The computational complexity of the proposed method is reduced about maximum 8.8% than conventional method. Furthermore, the coding efficiency of the proposed method is about maximum 7.3% better than H.264/AVC de-blocking filter.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07e
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• pp.1996-1999
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• 2003

Stereo matching is an important technique in the are of computer vision. There are already many theorems to find disparity map using stereo images. Usually, disparity is searched by using block matching. However block matching result in blocking effects caused by using fixed size window for computing pixel correlations. This paper suggests an efficient method to remove the blocking effect in stereo matching procedures.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.36S no.11
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• pp.112-119
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• 1999

TMN5 has been used to evaluate the performance of H.263, the ITU-T/LBC standard of moving picture coding. As DCT is used as transform coding methods in TMN5, blocking effect exists seriously in reconstruction picture at low bit rate. In this pater, DWT is substituted for DCT and adaptive quantizer is designed while the structure of TMN5 is maintained to be excellent in the transplantation of conventional system. It has shown that average PSNR is reduced by 0.35dB in luminance but increased by 2dB in chrominance comparing with that of TMN5. As block effect is reduced in reconstruction picture, the subjective picture quality is better than that of TMN5. Picture drop is, also, reduced because much more frames are transmitted at same bit rate.