• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2016

In this work, we considered a compressed-sensing (CS)-based image deblurring scheme with a total-variation (TV) regularization penalty for improving image characteristics in digital tomosynthesis (DTS). We implemented the proposed image deblurring algorithm and performed a systematic simulation to demonstrate its viability. We also performed an experiment by using a table-top setup which consists of an x-ray tube operated at $90kV_p$, 6 mAs and a CMOS-type flat-panel detector having a $198-{\mu}m$ pixel resolution. In the both simulation and experiment, 51 projection images were taken with a tomographic angle range of ${\theta}=60^{\circ}$ and an angle step of ${\Delta}{\theta}=1.2^{\circ}$ and then deblurred by using the proposed deblurring algorithm before performing the common filtered-backprojection (FBP)-based DTS reconstruction. According to our results, the image sharpness of the recovered x-ray images and the reconstructed DTS images were significantly improved and the cross-plane spatial resolution in DTS was also improved by a factor of about 1.4. Thus the proposed deblurring scheme appears to be effective for the blurring problems in both conventional radiography and DTS and is applicable to improve the present image characteristics.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.438-456
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• 2010

Iris recognition uses a unique iris pattern of user to identify person. In order to enhance the performance of iris recognition, it is reported that the diameter of iris region should be greater than 200 pixels in the captured iris image. So, the previous iris system used zoom lens camera, which can increase the size and cost of system. To overcome these problems, we propose a new method of enhancing the accuracy of iris recognition on low-resolution iris images which are captured without a zoom lens. This research is novel in the following two ways compared to previous works. First, this research is the first one to analyze the performance degradation of iris recognition according to the decrease of the image resolution by excluding other factors such as image blurring and the occlusion of eyelid and eyelash. Second, in order to restore a high-resolution iris image from single low-resolution one, we propose a new method based on multiple multi-layered perceptrons (MLPs) which are trained according to the edge direction of iris patterns. From that, the accuracy of iris recognition with the restored images was much enhanced. Experimental results showed that when the iris images down-sampled by 6% compared to the original image were restored into the high resolution ones by using the proposed method, the EER of iris recognition was reduced as much as 0.133% (1.485% - 1.352%) in comparison with that by using bi-linear interpolation

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.55-64
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• 2017

Purpose Recently, with the spread of SPECT/CT, various image correction methods can be applied quickly and accurately, which enabled us to expect quantitative accuracy as well as image quality improvement. Among them, the Collimator Detector Response(CDR) recovery is a correction method aiming at resolution recovery by compensating the blurring effect generated from the distance between the detector and the object. The purpose of this study is to find out quantitative change depending on the change in detection distance in SPECT/CT images with CDR recovery applied. Materials and Methods In order to find out the error of acquisition count depending on the change of detection distance, we set the detection distance according to the obit type as X, Y axis radius 30cm for circular, X, Y axis radius 21cm, 10cm for non-circular and non-circular auto(=auto body contouring, ABC_spacing limit 1cm) and applied reconstruction methods by dividing them into Astonish(3D-OSEM with CDR recovery) and OSEM(w/o CDR recovery) to find out the difference in activity recovery depending on the use of CDR recovery. At this time, attenuation correction, scatter correction, and decay correction were applied to all images. For the quantitative evaluation, calibration scan(cylindrical phantom, $^{99m}TcO_4$ 123.3 MBq, water 9293 ml) was obtained for the purpose of calculating the calibration factor(CF). For the phantom scan, a 50 cc syringe was filled with 31 ml of water and a phantom image was obtained by setting $^{99m}TcO_4$ 123.3 MBq. We set the VOI(volume of interest) in the entire volume of the syringe in the phantom image to measure total counts for each condition and obtained the error of the measured value against true value set by setting CF to check the quantitative accuracy according to the correction. Results The calculated CF was 154.28 (Bq/ml/cps/ml) and the measured values against true values in each conditional image were analyzed to be circular 87.5%, non-circular 90.1%, ABC 91.3% and circular 93.6%, non-circular 93.6%, ABC 93.9% in OSEM and Astonish, respectively. The closer the detection distance, the higher the accuracy of OSEM, and Astonish showed almost similar values regardless of distance. The error was the largest in the OSEM circular(-13.5%) and the smallest in the Astonish ABC(-6.1%). Conclusion SPECT/CT images showed that when the distance compensation is made through the application of CDR recovery, the detection distance shows almost the same quantitative accuracy as the proximity detection even under the distant condition, and accurate correction is possible without being affected by the change in detection distance.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.39 no.6
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• pp.664-671
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• 2002

고속으로 압축변환을 하기 위해 DCT(Discrete Cosine Transform) 영역에서 영상의 해상도를 줄이는 MPEG-2 복호기를 제안한다. 제안하는 복호기는 움직임 보상을 하기 전에 DCT 영역에서 영상의 해상도를 줄이며 해상도가 줄어든 영상에 대해서 DCT 영역에서 움직임 보상을 수행한다. 본래 해상도의 영상 (N${\times}$CN)에서는 1/2화소 정밀도의 움직임 보상을 해야 하지만 해상도가 반으로 줄어든 영상(N/2${\times}$N/2)에 대해서는 1/4화소 정밀도의 움직임 보상을 수행해야 한다. 하지만 해상도가 줄어든 영상에 대해 1/4화소 정밀도의 움직임 보상을 수행하면 영상이 흐릿해지는 현상이 발생할 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 해상도를 줄인 영상에 대해 계산시간 뿐만 아니라 DCT 영역에서의 움직임 보상 시에 발생 할 수 있는 흐려짐도 줄일 수 있는 방법을 제안한다. 실험 결과는 제안한 방법이 높은 해상도의 영상을 낮은 해상도의 영상으로 효율적으로 복호할 수 있는 알고리즘이라는 것을 보여준다.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.139-147
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• 2001

Since various noises degrade not only image quality but also compression efficiency in MPEG and H.263, pre-processing is necessary to reduce spatial and temporal noise and to increase ceding efficiency as well. In this paper, we propose a simplified method for noise detection, spatial and temporal noise reduction. Noise detection is based on correlation of the current pixel with its neighboring 4 pixels. Spatial noose reduction utilizes a non-rectangular median filter that is less complex than the conventional rectangular median filter. The proposed temporal filter is an IIR average filter using LUT(Look-up Table) to enhance subjective video quality. The proposed pre-processing method is very simple and efficient.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2007.06a
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• pp.630-633
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• 2007

In this paper, a blind watermarking method using binary images as watermarks is proposed. In order to enhance the detection capability against various attacks that transform watermarked image, the method uses asymmetric thresholds for inserting and detecting. Also, in order to reduce errors in the detected value of watermarks according to small changes in the coefficient values when detecting watermarks, it set the range for movement variation of the coefficients and lowered the sensitivity of variation by ignoring the variations that fall into this range. The experimental results show that the proposed method has good quality and is robust to various attacks such as the JPEG lossy compression, noise addition, cropping, blurring etc.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.48 no.5
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• pp.72-83
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a method to detect and recover the occluded parts of face images using the correlation between pairs of pixels. In a training stage, correlation coefficients between every pairs of pixels are calculated using the occlusion-free face images. Once a new occluded face image is shown, the occluded area is detected and recovered using the correlation coefficients obtained in the training stage. We compare the performance of the proposed method with the conventional method based on PCA. The results show that the proposed method detects and recovers occluded area with much smaller noises than the conventional PCA based method. Moreover, recovered images by the proposed method were more smooth with reduced blurring effect.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.269-275
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• 2017

Automatic vehicle detection is a very important function for autonomous vehicles. Conventional vehicle detection approaches are based on visible-light images obtained from cameras mounted on a vehicle in the daytime. However, unlike daytime, a visible-light image is generally dark at night, and the contrast is low, which makes it difficult to recognize a vehicle. As a feature point that can be used even in the low light conditions of nighttime, the rear lamp is virtually unique. However, conventional rear lamp-based detection methods seldom cope with atypical lamps, such as LED lamps, or flashing turn signals. In this paper, we detect atypical lamps by blurring the lamp area with a low pass filter (LPF) to make out the lamp shape. We also propose to detect flickering of the turn signal lamp in a manner such that the lamp area is vertically projected, and the maximum difference of two paired lamps is examined. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a higher F-measure value of 0.24 than the conventional lamp pairing-based detection methods, on average. In addition, the proposed algorithm shows a fast processing time of 6.4 ms per frame, which verifies real-time performance of the proposed algorithm.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.10B no.6
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• pp.619-628
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• 2003

In this paper, an effective watermark detection technique in the wavelet transform domain is proposed. In this proposed method, the image is 2-level wavelet transformed, and then the watermark with a binary logo is embedded into middle band except baseband and high band to consider Invisibility and robustness. In this paper, we use an asymmetric thresholds watermarking (ATW) in which detection threshold is higher than inserting threshold in order to enhance watermark detection ratio in attacked images. In watermark detection phase, the detection value is not changed when the difference of the selected wavelet neighboring coefficient pairs Is smaller than specific value. The experimental results show that the proposed method has good quality and is robust to various attacks such as the JPEG lossy compression, noise addition, cropping, blurring, etc.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.486-491
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• 2016

Disturbance/vibration reduction is critical in many applications using machine vision. The off-focusing or blurring error caused by vibration degrades the machine performance. In line with this, real-time disturbance estimation and avoidance are proposed in this study instead of going with a more familiar approach, such as the vibration absorber. The instantaneous motion caused by the disturbance is sensed by an attitude heading reference system module. A periodic vibration modeling is conducted to provide a better performance. The algorithm for vibration avoidance is described according to the vibration modeling. The vibration occurrence function is also proposed, and its parameters are determined using the genetic algorithm. The proposed algorithm is experimentally tested for its effectiveness in the vision inspection system.