• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.1782-1790
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• 2011

The goal of image processing is to improve the perceptual aspect and visual appearance of images for human viewers. The objectives of image enhancement vary according to its specific application and an image enhancement techniques used for a specific objective may not be accepted in some other applications. In this paper we review some of conventional enhancement techniques, such as histogram shrink, equalization, and the conservative adaptive contrast enhancement filter. And also, The adaptive contrast enhancement filter has optimized the applied values of variables which is configured rightly the medical image field. In the postprocessing, we used the histogram equalization method. As a result, the inputs which used a medical images has enhanced the edges of a result images which has applied the proposed filter. And also, because of the postprocessing, the image outlines has been lightened.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.4475-4481
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• 2014

A histogram equalization method have been used traditionally for the image enhancement of low quality images. This uses the transformation function, which is a cumulative density function of an input image, and it has mathematically maximum entropy. This method, however, may yield whitening artifacts. This paper proposes the weighted histogram equalization method based on histogram equalization. It has Weber-Fechner's law for a human's vision characteristics, and a dynamic range modification to solve the problem of some methods, which yield a transformation function, regardless of the input image. Finally, the proposed transformation function was calculated using the weighted average of Weber-Fechner and the histogram equalization transformation functions in a modified dynamic range. The simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm effectively enhances the contrast in terms of the subjective quality. In addition, the proposed method has similar or higher entropy than the other conventional approaches.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.61-73
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• 2012

This paper proposes a histogram specification based image enhancement method, which uses the brightness mean and variance of an image to maximize the entropy of the image. In our histogram specification step, the Gaussian distribution is used to fit the input histogram as well as produce the target histogram. Specifically, the input histogram is fitted with the Gaussian distribution whose mean and variance are equal to the brightness mean(${\mu}$) and variance(${\sigma}2$) of the input image, respectively; and the target Gaussian distribution also has the mean of the value ${\mu}$, but takes as the variance the value which is determined such that the output image has the maximum entropy. Experimental results show that compared to the existing methods, the proposed method preserves the mean brightness well and generates more natural looking images.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.11
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• pp.155-164
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• 2014

Local histogram equalization is one of the most popular ways of enhancing the local brightness features of an input image. However, local histogram equalization reveals some problems. First, undesired artifacts are produced by over-enhancing the local features. Second, the enhancement of local features does not always result in global contrast enhancement. To cope with these problems, we propose an illumination driven local histogram equalization method. First, to estimate the illumination information, the proposed method combines the input image and the blurred image produced through the process of the down-sampling and the up-sampling. Next, the proposed method adaptively adjusts the mapping function estimated by the local histogram equalization using the information of the illumination. As a result, the proposed illumination information driven local histogram equalization method simultaneously enhances the global and the local contrast levels while preventing any local artifacts. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional methods on objective and subjective criteria.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.186-189
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• 2002

Real-time thermal image is obtained by thermal imaging systems measuring radiant emittence according to law of Plank's blackbody radiation. The histogram of thermal image is not uniform. The signal bands of background and target are separated and grouped in narrow bands. In such a system, contrast enhancement indispensible to distinguish target from background. In this study, plateau histogram equalization using local histogram is proposed for contrast enhancement.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1233-1243
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• 2015

The contrast enhancement is great challenge in the image processing when images are suffering from poor contrast problem. Therefore, in order to overcome this problem an automatic method is proposed for contrast enhancement of natural color images. The proposed method consist of two stages: in first stage lightness component in YIQ color space is normalized by sigmoid function after the adaptive histogram equalization is applied on Y component and in second stage automatic color contrast enhancement algorithm is applied on output of the first stage. The proposed algorithm is tested on different NASA color images, hyperspectral color images and other types of natural color images. The performance of proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms in terms of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor. The higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor imply that the visual quality of the enhanced image is good. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed algorithm provides higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor as compared to other existing contrast enhancement algorithms. The proposed algorithm also provides better visual enhancement results as compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.39-47
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose an approach for real time computation of rayleigh CLAHE using a FPGA. The contrast enhancement technique should be applied in thermal equipment having a low contrast image. And thermal equipment must be processed in real time. The CLAHE is an improved algorithm based Histogram Equalization, but the HW design is complex. A value greater than a given threshold in CLAHE should be equally distributed on the other histogram bin, this process requires iterations for the distribution. But implementation of this processing in the FPGA is constrained, so this section was implemented on the assumption of the histogram distribution or modified the operation process or implemented separately in the CPU. In this paper, we designed a distinct redistribution operation in two stages. So FPGA was designed for easy, this was designed to be distributed evenly without the assumptions and constraints. In addition, we have designed a CLAHE with the rayleigh distribution to the FPGA. The simulation shows that the proposed method provides a better image quality in the thermal image.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2007.07a
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• pp.361-362
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• 2007

We propose a contrast-controlled feature detection approach for steel radiograph image. X-ray images are low contrast, dark and high noise image. So, It is not simple to detect defects directly in automated radiography inspection system. Contrast enhancement, histogram equalization and median filter are the most frequently used techniques to enhance the X-ray images. In this paper, the adaptive control method based on contrast limited histogram equalization is compared with several histogram techniques. Through comparative analysis, CLAHE(contrast controlled adaptive histogram equalization) can enhance detection of defects better.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.1409-1416
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• 2012

An image segmentation result depends on pre-processing steps such as contrast enhancement, edge detection, and smooth filtering etc. Especially medical images are low contrast and contain some noises. Therefore, the contrast enhancement and noise removal techniques are required in the pre-processing. In this study, we present an extension by a novel histogram equalization in which both local and global contrast is enhanced using neighborhood metrics. When checking neighborhood information, filters can simultaneously improve image quality. Most important is that original image information can be used for both global brightness preserving and local contrast enhancement, and image quality improvement filtering. Our experiments confirmed that the proposed method is more effective than other similar techniques reported previously.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.269-272
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• 2005

The principal objective of enhancement methods is to process an image so that the result is more suitable than the original image for a specific application. Images taken in the night can be low-contrast images because of poor environments. In this paper, we compare the structure of ICECA(Image Contrast Enhancement technique using Clustering Algorithm) with the structures of HE(Histogram Equalization), BBHE(Brightness preserving Bi-Histogram Equalization), and Multi -Scale Retinex(MSR). We compared performances of image enhancement methods by applying these methods to a set of diverse images.