• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.131-143
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• 2014

We propose a no-reference perceptual fog density and visibility prediction model in a single foggy scene based on natural scene statistics (NSS) and perceptual "fog aware" statistical features. Unlike previous studies, the proposed model predicts fog density without multiple foggy images, without salient objects in a scene including lane markings or traffic signs, without supplementary geographical information using an onboard camera, and without training on human-rated judgments. The proposed fog density and visibility predictor makes use of only measurable deviations from statistical regularities observed in natural foggy and fog-free images. Perceptual "fog aware" statistical features are derived from a corpus of natural foggy and fog-free images by using a spatial NSS model and observed fog characteristics including low contrast, faint color, and shifted luminance. The proposed model not only predicts perceptual fog density for the entire image but also provides local fog density for each patch size. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model against human judgments regarding fog visibility, we executed a human subjective study using a variety of 100 foggy images. Results show that the predicted fog density of the model correlates well with human judgments. The proposed model is a new fog density assessment work based on human visual perceptions. We hope that the proposed model will provide fertile ground for future research not only to enhance the visibility of foggy scenes but also to accurately evaluate the performance of defog algorithms.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.11
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• pp.165-173
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• 2014

This paper presents a fast and high-quality haze removal method by the modification of the conventional transmission estimation process. In the conventional haze removal method, the halo and blocking artifacts arises while estimating the transmission. In order to effectively reduce the artifacts, the proposed method employs the maximum filter after the calculation of the dark channel. Because of the reduction of the artifacts, the proposed method can simplify the transmission refinement process without sacrificing the quality of the results: this paper proposes to use the single-channel guided filter instead of the multi-channel guided filter. The experimental results demonstrate that the quality of the dehazed results by the proposed transmission correction process is improved and the haze removal speed is increased by up to 59.6%, when compared to the conventional ones.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.634-638
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• 2018

Haze is a factor that degrades the performance of various image processing algorithms, such as those for detection, tracking, and recognition using an electro-optical sensor. For robust operation of an electro-optical sensor-based unmanned system used outdoors, an algorithm capable of effectively removing haze is needed. As a haze removal method using a single electro-optical sensor, the dark channel prior using statistical properties of the electro-optical sensor is most widely known. Previous methods used a square filter in the process of obtaining a transmission using the dark channel prior. When a square filter is used, the effect of removing haze becomes smaller as the size of the filter becomes larger. When the size of the filter becomes excessively small, over-saturation occurs, and color information in the image is lost. Since the size of the filter greatly affects the performance of the algorithm, a relatively large filter is generally used, or a small filter is used so that no over-saturation occurs, depending on the image. In this paper, we propose an improved haze removal method using color image segmentation. The parameters of the color image segmentation are automatically set according to the information complexity of the image, and the over-saturation phenomenon does not occur by estimating the amount of transmission based on the parameters.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.10
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• pp.1477-1482
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• 2022

Haze is a local weather phenomenon in which very small droplets float in the atmosphere, and the amount and characteristics of haze may vary depending on the region. In particular, these haze reduce visibility, which can cause air traffic interference and vehicle traffic accidents, and degrade the quality of security CCTVs and so on. Therefore, in the past 10 years, research on haze removal has been actively conducted to reduce damage caused by haze. In this study, local haze removal is performed by weight generation using a haziness degree evaluator to adaptively respond to haze-free, homogeneous haze, and non-homogeneous haze cases. And the proposed method improves the limitations of the existing static haze removal method, which assumes that there is haze in the input image and removes the haze. We also demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method through quantitative and qualitative performance evaluations with benchmark algorithms.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.257-264
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• 2019

This paper presents a single image haze removal method via a pixel-based joint BDCP (bright and dark channel prior) and a hierarchical bilateral filter in order to reduce computational complexity and memory requirement while improving the dehazing performance. Pixel-based joint BDCP reduces the computational complexity compared to the patch-based DCP, while making it possible to estimate the atmospheric light in pixel unit and the transmission more accurately. Moreover the bilateral filter, which can smooth an image effectively while preserving edges, refines the transmission to reduce the halo effects, and its hierarchical structure applied to edges only prevents the increase of complexity from the iterative application. Experimental results on various hazy images show that the proposed method exhibits excellent haze removal performance with low computational complexity compared to the conventional methods, and thus it can be applied in various fields.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.145-151
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• 2014

This paper proposes an image haze removal algorithm for a single image. The conventional Dark Channel Prior(DCP) algorithm estimates a transmission map using the dark information in an image, and the haze regions are then detected using a matting algorithm. However, since the DCP algorithm uses block-based processing, block artifacts are invariably formed in the transmission map. To solve this problem, the proposed algorithm generates a modified transmission map using a Hidden Markov Random Field(HMRF) and Expectation-Maximization(EM) algorithm. Experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm is superior to conventional algorithms in image haze removal.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.8
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• pp.45-52
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• 2017

This paper presents a high-performance software-hardware dehazing system based on a dedicated hardware accelerator for the haze removal. In the proposed system, the dedicated hardware accelerator performs the dark-channel-prior-based dehazing process, and the software performs the other control processes. For this purpose, the dehazing process is realized as an OpenCL kernel by finding the inherent parallelism in the algorithm and is synthesized into a hardware by employing a high-level-synthesis technique. The proposed system executes the dehazing process much faster than the previous software-only dehazing system: the performance improvement is up to 96.3% in terms of the execution time.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.819-824
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• 2021

As technologies related to image processing such as autonomous driving and CCTV develop, fog removal algorithms using a single image are being studied to improve the problem of image distortion. As a method of predicting fog density, there is a method of estimating the depth of an image by generating a depth map, and various fog features may be used as training data of the depth map. In addition, it is essential to implement a hardware capable of processing high-definition images in real time in order to apply the fog removal algorithm to actual technologies. In this paper, we implement NLCV (Normalize Local Coefficient of Variation), a feature of fog based on coefficient of variation, in hardware. The proposed hardware is an FPGA implementation of Xilinx's xczu7ev-2ffvc1156 as a target device. As a result of synthesis through the Vivado program, it has a maximum operating frequency of 479.616MHz and shows that real-time processing is possible in 4K UHD environment.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2011.11a
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• pp.326-329
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• 2011

안개나 스모그 등으로 인한 영상의 왜곡에 대해 Dark Channel Prior 를 이용해 안개제거를 하면 깨끗한 결과 영상을 얻을 수 있다. 하지만 이 기법에서 전달량을 정련할 때 많은 시간이 걸리는데 계산 속도 면을 개선하기 위해 Gaussian Filter 를 사용해 정련한다. 이 때 단순한 Gaussian Filter 를 사용하게 되면 결과영상에서 후광효과가 생기게 된다. 후광효과를 줄이기 위해 본 논문에서 제안한 적응 Gaussian Filter 를 사용해 영상을 복원시킨다.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.697-705
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• 2015

This paper proposes a high-speed and high-quality haze removal method based on dual dark channels. In the conventional method, the halo artifacts are suppressed by the additional transmission refinement, but the transmission refinement is computationally intensive and the quality of the haze removal is sometimes unsatisfactory because of the residual halo artifacts. In the proposed method, the transmission is estimated with the mixture of the two dark channels with different window size. By mixing the two dark channels so as to avoid the halo artifacts, the proposed method realizes a high-quality haze removal even without the transmission refinement. Experimental results demonstrate that the quality of the results by the proposed method is superior to those by the conventional method and the speed of the haze removal is about 14.2 times higher than that of the conventional method.