• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.65-73
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• 2017

This paper proposes a method to improve the image quality by designing Unsharp Mask Filter (UMF) based on Retinex theory which controls the frequency pass characteristics adaptively. Conventional unsharp masking technique uses blurring image to emphasize sharpness of image. Unsharp Masking(UM) adjusts the original image and sigma to obtain a high frequency component to be emphasized by the difference between the blurred image and the high frequency component to the original image, thereby improving the contrast ratio of the image. In this paper, we design a Unsharp Mask Filter(UMF) that can process the contrast ratio improvement method of Unsharp Masking(UM) technique with one filtering. We adaptively process the contrast ratio improvement using Unsharp Mask Filter(UMF). We propose a method based on Retinex theory for adaptive processing. For adaptive filtering, we control the weights of Unsharp Mask Filter(UMF) based on the human visual system and output more effective results.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.108-116
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose an image enhancement method based on Multi-Scale Retinex theory that designs Unsharp Masking Filter (UMF) and emphasizes the contrast ratio adaptively. Unsharp Masking (UM) technique emphasizes image sharpness and improves contrast ratio by adding high frequency component to the original image. The high frequency component is obtained by differentiating between original image and low frequency image. In this paper, we present how to design an UMF kernel and to adaptively apply it to increase the contrast ratio according to multi-scale retinex theory which resembles human visual system. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better quantitative performance indexes such as PSNR, ambe & SSIM and better qualitative feature like halo artifact suppression.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.821-828
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• 2018

Image Enhancement is used in various applications. Among them, unsharp masking methods can improve the contrast with a simple operation. However, it has problems of noise enhancement and halo effect caused by the use of a single filter. To solve this problems, adaptive processing using multi-scale and bilinear filters is being studied. These methods are effective for improving the halo effect, but it require a lot of calculation time. In this paper, we want to simplify adaptive filtering by generating a weight map based on local brightness. This weight map enables adaptive processing that eliminates the halo effect through a single multiplication operation. Through experiments, we confirmed the suppression of the halo effect through the result image of the proposed algorithm and existing algorithm.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2007.08b
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• pp.1692-1695
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• 2007

We describe the image enhancement method of applying two spatial filters with different characteristics adaptively. An adaptive method is introduced so that sharpness enhancement is performed only in regions where the image exhibits significant dynamics, while noise reduction is achieved in smooth regions. Simulation results show that the proposed method improved the image quality.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.224-231
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• 2009

Unsharp masking is a popular image enhancement technique used to sharpen an image appearance in gray images. However, the conventional unsharp making techniques amplify the noise and easily cause overshoot artifacts. Moreover, the unsharp masking tends to introduce color distortion when it is applied to the each color component independently. To solve these problems, we propose a novel unsharp masking technique based on human visual system and vector projection. The proposed algorithm consists of two steps. First, the proposed algorithm controls the level of sharpening by exploiting the characteristics of the human visual system and contrast region. Then the vector projection is applied to remove the color distortion. Experiment results show that our proposed algorithm successfully produces sharpened images that are free of noise and color distortion commonly found in the conventional unsharp masking algorithms.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.11
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• pp.56-63
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• 2012

In this paper, adaptive unsharp masking using bilateral filter, edge-preserving smoothing filter is proposed to reduce the overshoot and jagging artifact in sharpening images. Previous image enhancement methods including unsharp masking(UM) can emphasize high-frequency details strongly, but often cause several artifacts such as overshooting, noise, jagging and so on. Proposed image enhancement method preserves edges well because of using bilateral filter and sensitively controls a weight according to edge's directions. Therefore, it enhances sharpness and effectively reduces overshoot and jagging artifacts. Simulation results comparing output of previous AUM with proposed method show that proposed algorithm makes images properly enhanced, and we know that overshoot and jagging artifacts are many reduced.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.893-894
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a sharpening approach which is based on unsharp masking through the adaptive windowing. This adaptive windowing changes the window size of the low-pass filter which is used in unsharp mask for reducing the halo artifacts.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.371-380
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• 2011

The noise caused by a variety of reasons worsens the quality of input image when we use the images reproducing device. The basic difficulty to solve this problem is that the noise and the signal are difficult to be distinguished. Contrast enhancement such as unsharp masking is one of the most important procedures to improve the quality of input images. The conventional unsharp masking enhances the images by adding their amplified high frequency components. The noise component of the input images, however, also tends to be amplified due to the nature of the unsharp masking. This paper considers the block approach for detecting niose and image feature of the input image so that the unsharp masking could be adaptively applied accordingly. Simulation results show that it is made possible to enhance contrast of the image without boosting up the noisy components by applying the proposed algorithm.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.27-34
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• 2011

In this paper, the novel approach for image contrast enhancement is introduced. The method is based on the unsharp mask and directional information of images. Since the unsharp mask techniques give better visual quality than the conventional sharpening mask, there are much works on image enhancement using unsharp masks. The proposed algorithm decomposes the image to several blocks and extracts directional information using DCT. From the geometric properties of the block, each block is labeled as appropriate type and processed by adaptive unsharp mask. The masking process is skipped at the flat area to reduce the noise artifact, but at the texture and edge area, the adaptive unsharp mask is applied to enhance the image contrast based on the edge direction. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm produces the contrast enhanced images with superior visual quality, suppressing the noise effects and enhancing edge at the same time.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.199-204
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• 2007

In digital radiography, to improve the contrast of digital radiography image, the multi-scale nonlinear amplification algorithm based on unsharp masking is one of the major image enhancement algorithms. In this paper, we used the Laplacian pyramid to decompose a digital radiography(DR) image. In our simulation, the DR image was decomposed into seven layers and the coefficients of the each layer was amplified with nonlinear function. We also imported a noise containment algorithm to limit noise amplification. To enhance the contrast of image, we proposed a new adaptive non-linear gain amplification coefficients. As a result of having applied to some clinical data, a detail visibility was improved significantly without unacceptable noise boosting. Images that acquired with the proposed adaptive non-linear gain coefficients have shown superior quality to those that applied similar gain control method and expected to be accepted in the clinical applications.