• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.19-23
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• 2013

TIn this paper, we propose a novel fuzzy stretching method that adopts a triangle type fuzzy membership function to control the highest and lowest brightness limit dynamically. As an essential procedure to enhance the brightness contrast, stretching is an important procedure in color image processing. While popular Ends-in Search stretching method should be provided fixed minimum and maximum brightness threshold from experience, our proposed method determines them dynamically by fuzzy membership functions. The minimum and maximum limit is determined by computing the lowest and highest pixel value according to the membership degree of our designed triangle type membership function. The experiment shows that the proposed method result in far less skewed histogram than those of Ends-in Search stretching thus successfully verifies its effectiveness.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.106-109
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• 2017

Recently, ancient documents are actively studied and discussed. However, ancient documents has a few problems on interpretation. The antique documents are too fragile to hand over. So, some studies have been carried out using terahertz to read ancient documents without damaging them. Three techniques are necessary to read letters using terahertz. First, PPEX algorithm, which distinguishes pages. Second, TGSI technique, which distinguishes text from paper on a page. Third, CCSC algorithm, which transforms signals to letters. In this paper, we will describe the preprocessing process to facilitate the recognition of letters before applying the post processing as we mentioned above. Histogram equalization, Histogram stretching and the Sobel filter were applied to the preprocessing.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.840-866
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• 2014

Visibility in underwater images is usually poor because of the attenuation of light in the water that causes low contrast and color variation. In this paper, a new approach for underwater image quality improvement is presented. The proposed method aims to improve underwater image contrast, increase image details, and reduce noise by applying a new method of using contrast stretching to produce two different images with different contrasts. The proposed method integrates the modification of the image histogram in two main color models, RGB and HSV. The histograms of the color channel in the RGB color model are modified and remapped to follow the Rayleigh distribution within certain ranges. The image is then converted to the HSV color model, and the S and V components are modified within a certain limit. Qualitative and quantitative analyses indicate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of contrast, details, and noise reduction. The image color also shows much improvement.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.25-44
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• 2010

With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, it has become necessary to protect private information and content in these devices. Face recognition has been favored over conventional passwords or security keys, because it can be easily implemented using a built-in camera, while providing user convenience. However, because mobile devices can be used both indoors and outdoors, there can be many illumination changes, which can reduce the accuracy of face recognition. Therefore, we propose a new face recognition method on a mobile device robust to illumination variations. This research makes the following four original contributions. First, we compared the performance of face recognition with illumination variations on mobile devices for several illumination normalization procedures suitable for mobile devices with low processing power. These include the Retinex filter, histogram equalization and histogram stretching. Second, we compared the performance for global and local methods of face recognition such as PCA (Principal Component Analysis), LNMF (Local Non-negative Matrix Factorization) and LBP (Local Binary Pattern) using an integer-based kernel suitable for mobile devices having low processing power. Third, the characteristics of each method according to the illumination va iations are analyzed. Fourth, we use two matching scores for several methods of illumination normalization, Retinex and histogram stretching, which show the best and $2^{nd}$ best performances, respectively. These are used as the inputs of an SVM (Support Vector Machine) classifier, which can increase the accuracy of face recognition. Experimental results with two databases (data collected by a mobile device and the AR database) showed that the accuracy of face recognition achieved by the proposed method was superior to that of other methods.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1904-1926
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• 2016

Iris recognition for biometric personnel identification has gained much interest owing to the increasing concern with security today. The image quality plays a major role in the performance of iris recognition systems. When capturing an iris image under uncontrolled conditions and dealing with non-cooperative people, the chance of getting non-ideal images is very high owing to poor focus, off-angle, noise, motion blur, occlusion of eyelashes and eyelids, and wearing glasses. In order to improve the accuracy of iris recognition while dealing with non-ideal iris images, we propose a novel algorithm that improves the quality of degraded iris images. First, the iris image is localized properly to obtain accurate iris boundary detection, and then the iris image is normalized to obtain a fixed size. Second, the valid region (iris region) is extracted from the segmented iris image to obtain only the iris region. Third, to get a well-distributed texture image, bilinear interpolation is used on the segmented valid iris gray image. Using contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) enhances the low contrast of the resulting interpolated image. The results of CLAHE are further improved by stretching the maximum and minimum values to 0-255 by using histogram-stretching technique. The gray texture information is extracted by 1D Gabor filters while the Hamming distance technique is chosen as a metric for recognition. The NICE-II training dataset taken from UBRIS.v2 was used for the experiment. Results of the proposed method outperformed other methods in terms of equal error rate (EER).

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2011.01a
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• pp.89-92
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• 2011

본 논문에서는 컬러 영상에 대해 삼각형 타입의 소속 함수를 적용하여 스트레칭의 상한과 하한을 동적으로 설정하고 영상을 스트레칭 하는 방법을 제안한다. 제안된 퍼지 스트레칭 방법은 평균 밝기 값을 기준으로 가장 어두운 픽셀 값과 가장 밝은 픽셀 값의 거리를 계산하여 밝기의 조정율을 결정한 후, 최소 밝기 값 및 최대 밝기 값을 구하고 삼각형 타입 소속 함수의 구간에 적용한다. 영상의 픽셀 값들을 소속 함수에 적용하여 소속도를 구하고 cut를 적용하여 가장 낮은 픽셀 값을 스트레칭 하한으로 가장 높은 픽셀 값을 스트레칭 상한으로 설정하여 컬러 영상을 스트레칭 한다. 다양한 영상에 적용한 결과, 기존의 스트레칭 방법보다 제안된 퍼지 스트레칭 방법이 효율적인 것을 확인하였다.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.51-60
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• 2013

In this paper, to control the existing headlamp control system using steering wheel angle more efficiently and more actively, image processing algorithm which improved the detection rate of lane at night based on camera was suggested. And to recognize road lane more clearly in the conditions of low illumination, new algorithms were developed in the aspects of improving brightness, extracting clear lane edge and using the characteristics of lane. Through this research, it turned out that lane detection ability by using the normalized stretching, angular mask and expected-area scan have good performance in the night compare to existing algorithms.

• 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.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.859-864
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• 2018

This paper is about image improvement - we used the contrast ratio and the outline emphasis method after synthesizing two low quality images utilized by several low definition cameras. Two raspberry cameras were used to capture each image, and then we synthesized images with MATLAB program. After applying the mean computation (alignment, geometry, and harmony) to synthesized image, we extracted the cross-space. In the experiment of this study, we identified and compared the improvement consequences of extracted, synthesized image after applying outline emphasis(unsharpmask filter, highboost filter) and increasing contrast ratio (histogram uniformity, histogram stretching) to the original images.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2016

We propose an adaptive histogram stretching algorithm for application to a car's personal recorder. The algorithm was used for pre-processing to detect the license plate region in an image from a personal recorder. The algorithm employs a Probability Density Function (PDF) and Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) to analyze the distribution diagram of the images. These two functions are calculated using an image obtained by sampling at a certain pixel interval. The images were subjected to different levels of stretching, and experiments were done on the images to extract their characteristics. The results show that the proposed algorithm provides less deterioration than conventional algorithms. Moreover, contrast is enhanced according to the characteristics of the image. The algorithm could provide better performance than existing algorithms in applications for detecting search regions for license plates.