• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.10-20
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• 2008

Generally, to acquire an HDR image, many images that cover the entire dynamic range of the scene with different exposure times are required, then these images are fused into one HDR image. This paper proposes an efficient method for the HDR image acquisition with small number of images. First, we estimated scenic dynamic range using two images with different exposure times. These two images contain the upper and lower limit of the scenic dynamic range. Independently of the scene, according to varied exposure times, similar characteristics for both the maximum gray levels in images that include the upper limit and the minimum gray levels in images that include the lower limit are identified. After modeling these characteristics, the scenic dynamic range is estimated using the modeling results. This estimated scenic dynamic range is then used to select the proper exposure times for the acquisition of an HDR image. We selected only three proper exposure times because entire dynamic range of the cameras could be covered by three dynamic range of the cameras with different exposure times. To evaluate the error of the HDR image, experiments using virtual digital camera images were carried out. For several test images, the error of the HDR image using proposed method was comparable to that of the HDR image which utilize more than ten images for the HDR image acquisition.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.82-86
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• 2017

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging offers a radically approach of representing colors in digital images. Instead of using the range of colors produced by given devices, HDR imaging method manipulates and stores all colors and brightness levels visible to the human eye. To faithfully represent, store and then reproduce all these effects, the original scene must be stored and treated using high fidelity HDR techniques. Then, tone mapping is required to accommodate HDR image to low dynamic range (LDR) devices, and tone mapping operation of HDR image for realistic display is commonly researched. However, color visualization for analyzing scene luminance in HDR imaging has less attention from researches. This paper presents and implements a method for reproduction and visualization of the false color in HDR images. We produce a color visualization framework with several mapping functions, and evaluate their effectiveness by using RMAE and SNR with commonly used HDR image data. Experiment reveals that the sigmodal mapping function shows better performance in the false color visualization, compared to other methods.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.24 no.8
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• pp.1059-1067
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• 2021

In this paper, a HDR algorithm for a single image is proposed using the exposure fusion, that adaptively calculates gamma correction coefficients according to the image distribution. Since typical HDR methods should use at least three images with different exposure values at the same scene, the main problem was that they could not be applied at the single shot image. Thus, HDR enhancements based on a single image using tone mapping and histogram modifications were recently presented, but these created some location-specific noises due to improper corrections. Therefore, the proposed algorithm calculates proper gamma coefficients according to the distribution of the input image and generates different exposure images which are corrected by the dark and the bright region stretching. A HDR image reproduction controlling exposure fusion weights among the gamma corrected and the original pixels is presented. As the result, the proposed algorithm can reduce certain noises at both the flat and the edge areas and obtain subjectively superior image quality to that of conventional methods.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.219-226
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• 2007

An efficient block based two-layer JPEG encoding algorithm is proposed to compress high dynamic range (HDR) images in this work. The proposed algorithm separates an input HDR image into a tone-mapped low dynamic range (LDR) image and a ratio image, which represents the quotients of the original HDR pixels divided by the tone-mapped LDR pixels. Then, the tone-mapped LDR image is compressed using the standard JPEG scheme to preserve backward compatibility and the ratio image is encoded to minimize a cost function that models the perception of each block with different quantization parameters in the human visual system (HVS). Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides better performance than the conventional method, which encodes the ratio image without any prior information of blocks.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.283-292
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• 2018

Devices capable of capturing and displaying high dynamic range (HDR) images with significantly increased brightness range compared to low dynamic range (LDR) images have been developed and various methods for efficiently converting the brightness range of an image have been developed. In this paper, we propose a reverse tone mapping method using a guided filter to efficiently convert LDR images into HDR images. After obtaining brightness enhancement function (BEF) using a guided filter, we can reconstruct HDR image from one LDR image. In addition, when the image is too bright or dark, the proposed method maximizes the image quality of the reconstructed HDR image by estimating and adjusting the exposure value before expanding the brightness range of images. Computer simulations show that the proposed method produces HDR images of superior quality compared with the conventional methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.1
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• pp.111-120
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• 2015

HDR(High dynamic range) imaging is a technique to represent a dynamic range of real world. Exposure fusion is a method to obtain a pseudo-HDR image and it directly fuses multi-exposure images instead of generating the true-HDR image. However, it results ghost artifacts while fusing the multi-exposure images with moving objects. To solve this drawback, temporal consistency assessment is proposed to remove moving objects. Firstly, multi-level threshold bitmap and brightness bitmap are proposed. In addition, hue-angle constancy map between multi-exposure images is proposed for compensating a bitmap. Then, two bitmaps are combined as a temporal weight map. Spatial domain image quality assessment is used to generate a spatial weight map. Finally, two weight maps are applied at each multi-exposure image and combined to get the pseudo-HDR image. In experiments, the proposed method reduces ghost artifacts more than previous methods. The quantitative ghost-free evaluation of the proposed method is also less than others.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.35 no.4C
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• pp.350-357
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• 2010

In this paper, we present an auto-range fast bilateral filter (FBF) for high-dynamic-range (HDR) images, which increases computation speed by using adaptive standard deviations for range filter (RF) of FBF in iCAM06. Many images that cover the entire dynamic range of the scene with different exposure times are fused into one High Dynamic Range (HDR) image. The representative algorithm for HDR image rendering is iCAM06, which is based on the iCAM framework, such as the local white point adaptation, chromatic adaptation, and the image processing transform (IPT) uniform color space. FBF in iCAM06 uses constant standard deviation in RF. So, it causes unnecessary FBF computation in high stimulus range with broad and low distribution. To solve this problem, the low stimulus image and high stimulus image of CIE tri-stimulus values (XYZ) divided by the threshold are respectively processed by adaptive standard deviation based on its histogram distribution. Experiment results show that the proposed method reduces computation time than the previous FBF.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.9
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• pp.4389-4411
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• 2018

High dynamic range (HDR) images are becoming pervasive due to capturing or rendering of a wider range of luminance, but their special display equipment is difficult to be popularized because of high cost and technological problem. Thus, HDR images must be adapted to the conventional display devices by applying tone mapping (TM) operation, which puts forward higher requirements for intellectual property protection of HDR images. As the robustness presents regional diversity in the low dynamic range (LDR) watermarked image after TM, which is different from the traditional watermarking technologies, a concept of watermarking activity is defined and used to distinguish the essential distinction of watermarking between LDR image and HDR image in this paper. Then, a novel robust HDR image watermarking algorithm is proposed against TM operations. Firstly, based on the hybrid processing of redundant discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition, the watermark is embedded by modifying the structure information of the HDR image. Distinguished from LDR image watermarking, the high embedding strength can cause more obvious distortion in the high brightness regions of HDR image than the low brightness regions. Thus, a perceptual brightness mask with low complexity is designed to improve the imperceptibility further. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is robust to the existing TM operations, with taking into account the imperceptibility and embedded capacity, which is superior to the current state-of-art HDR image watermarking algorithms.

• Journal of The Korean Digital Architecture Interior Association
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.33-38
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• 2012

The purpose of luminance measurement in lighting design of urban scale is to prevent light trespass and light pollution, caused by over-bright. Specially, the illumination of road, tunnel and sports complex as urban infrastructure is measured by international standard for illuminance and luminance. It has been used the spot luminance meter and the image photometer to define the characteristics of qualitative and quantitative in exterior lighting. This study introduced the concept of HDR Image, procedure of HDR Image creation and analysis. Applications of HDR Image, particularly within the apartment building exterior lighting design analysis, have been demonstrated. The procedure proposed in this study is a affordable method that is useful for the assessment of luminance distribution in the scene with electric light. It also provides a measurement capability with the high resolution luminance data within a large field of view efficiently and quickly, which is not possible to achieve with a luminance meter.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2007.07a
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• pp.233-234
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• 2007

It is needed many images with different exposure to acquire high dynamic range (HDR) image of a scene using digital still camera. This paper proposed to acquire HDR image with small error using reduced number of image. Proposed method takes two pictures with different exposure and estimates dynamic range of scene using information two images, and takes three pictures with calculated proper exposure to acquire HDR image.