• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.518-523
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• 2017

This paper proposes a novel denoising method based on non-local(NL) means. The NL-means algorithm is effective for removing an additive Gaussian noise, but the denoising parameter should be controlled depending on the noise level for proper noise elimination. Therefore, the proposed method optimizes the denoising parameter according to the noise levels. The proposed method consists of two processes: off-line and on-line. In the off-line process, the relations between the noise level and the denoising parameter of the NL-means filter are analyzed. For a given noise level, the various denoising parameters are applied to the NL-means algorithm, and then the qualities of resulting images are quantified using a structural similarity index(SSIM). The parameter with the highest SSIM is chosen as the optimal denoising parameter for the given noise level. In the on-line process, we estimate the noise level for a given noisy image and select the optimal denoising parameter according to the estimated noise level. Finally, NL-means filtering is performed using the selected denoising parameter. As shown in the experimental results, the proposed method accurately estimated the noise level and effectively eliminated noise for various noise levels. The accuracy of noise estimation is 90.0% and the highest Peak Signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR), SSIM value.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.48 no.5
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• pp.84-95
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• 2011

In this paper, we present a deblocking algorithm that removes grid and staircase noises, which are called "blocking artifacts", occurred in the compressed satellite images. Particularly, the given satellite images are compressed with equal quantization coefficients in row according to region complexity, and more complicated regions are compressed more. However, this approach has a problem that relatively less complicated regions within the same row of complicated regions have blocking artifacts. Removing these artifacts with a general deblocking algorithm can blur complex and undesired regions as well. Additionally, the general filter lacks in preserving the curved edges. Therefore, the proposed algorithm presents an adaptive filtering scheme for removing blocking artifacts while preserving the image details including curved edges using the given quantization step size and content analysis. Particularly, WLFPCA (weighted lowpass filter using principle component analysis) is employed to reduce the artifacts around edges. Experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms SA-DCT in terms of subjective image quality.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.86-94
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• 2017

This study was conducted to derive a positioning map using multidimensional scaling method to understand how the brand image of national foods including Korean food, Chinese food, Japanese food, Thai food, and Vietnamese food is perceived by domestic and foreign tourists. In order to achieve the research purpose, this study collected 250 data through online and offline surveys for potential food tourists who are interested in visiting overseas. Except the unfaithful responses or missing values, 202 data were analyzed. As a result, first, 8 factors which are considered to be important by food tourists were extracted. Second, the result of similarity analysis using ALSCAL and PROXSCAL did not show that the foods of the five countries were very similar, but all countries seemed to be more likely to compete with each other. Third, attribute selection also indicates that mean value of food taste (3.88), national image (3.82), and sufficient food quantity (3.65) had high level of importance, respectively. These results may provide practical implications for development of branding strategy in food tourism.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.1-9
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• 2019

In this paper, we propose a video enhancement method using generative adversarial networks to remove raindrops and restore the background information on the removed region in the coastal wave video imagery distorted by raindrops during rainfall. Two experimental models are implemented: Pix2Pix network widely used for image-to-image translation and Attentive GAN, which is currently performing well for raindrop removal on a single images. The models are trained with a public dataset of paired natural images with and without raindrops and the trained models are evaluated their performance of raindrop removal and background information recovery of rainwater distortion of coastal wave video imagery. In order to improve the performance, we have acquired paired video dataset with and without raindrops at the real coast and conducted transfer learning to the pre-trained models with those new dataset. The performance of fine-tuned models is improved by comparing the results from pre-trained models. The performance is evaluated using the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index and the fine-tuned Pix2Pix network by transfer learning shows the best performance to reconstruct distorted coastal wave video imagery by raindrops.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.12
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• pp.113-123
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• 2012

Recently, various attempts have been made to apply Intelligent Transportation System under various environments and conditions. Consequently, an accurate license plate recognition regardless of vehicle location and viewing angle is required. In this paper, we propose a novel license plate recognition system which exploits a) the format of license plates to remove false candidates of license plates and to extract characters in license plates and b) the characteristics of Hangul for accurate character recognition. In order to eliminate false candidates of license plates, the proposed method first aligns the candidates of license plates horizontally, and compares the position and the shape of objects in each candidate with the prior information of license plates provided by Korean Ministry of Construction & Transportation. The prior information such as aspect ratio, background color, projection image is also used to extract characters in license plates accurately applying an improved local binarization considering luminance variation of license plates. In case of recognizing Hangul in license plates, they are initially grouped according to their shape similarity. Then a super-class method, a hierarchical analysis based on key feature points is applied to recognize Hangul accurately. The proposed method was verified with high recognition rate regardless of background image, which eventually proves that the proposed LPR system has high performance regardless of the vehicle location or viewing angle.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.396-404
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• 2014

The field of searching clothing, which is very difficult due to the nature of the informal sector, has been in an effort to reduce the recognition error and computational complexity. However, there is no concrete examples of the whole progress of learning and recognizing for cloth, and the related technologies are still showing many limitations. In this paper, the whole process including identifying both the person and cloth in an image and analyzing both its color and texture pattern is specifically shown for classification. Especially, deformable search descriptor, LBPROT_35 is proposed for identifying the pattern of clothing. The proposed method is scale and rotation invariant, so we can obtain even higher detection rate even though the scale and angle of the image changes. In addition, the color classifier with the color space quantization is proposed not to loose color similarity. In simulation, we build database by training a total of 810 images from the clothing images on the internet, and test some of them. As a result, the proposed method shows a good performance as it has 94.4% matching rate while the former Dense-SIFT method has 63.9%.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.43 no.1 s.307
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• pp.53-66
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• 2006

This paper proposes the combined image retrieval system that gives the same relevance as exhaustive search method while its performance can be considerably improved. This system is combined with two different retrieval methods and each gives the same results that full exhaustive search method does. Both of them are two-stage method. One uses condensation of feature vectors, and the other uses binary-tree clustering. These two methods extract the candidate images that always include correct answers at the first stage, and then filter out the incorrect images at the second stage. Inasmuch as these methods use equal algorithm, they can get the same result as full exhaustive search. The first method condenses the dimension of feature vectors, and it uses these condensed feature vectors to compute similarity of query and images in database. It can be found that there is an optimal condensation ratio which minimizes the overall retrieval time. The optimal ratio is applied to first stage of this method. Binary-tree clustering method, searching with recursive 2-means clustering, classifies each cluster dynamically with the same radius. For preserving relevance, its range of query has to be compensated at first stage. After candidate clusters were selected, final results are retrieved by computing similarities again at second stage. The proposed method is combined with above two methods. Because they are not dependent on each other, combined retrieval system can make a remarkable progress in performance.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.21-28
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• 2008

This paper proposes a novel reduced-reference assessment method for video quality assessment, in which one-dimensional (1-D) histograms of motion vectors (MVs) are used as features of videos. The proposed method is more efficient than the conventional methods in view of computation time, because the proposed quality metric decodes MVs directly from video stream in the parsing process instead of reconstructing the distorted video at the receiver. Moreover, in view of data size, the propose method is efficient because a sender transmits 1-D histograms of MVs accumulated over whole input video sequences. Here, we use 1-D histograms of MVs accumulated over the whole video sequences, which is different from the conventional methods that assessed each image independently. For testing the similarity between histograms, we use histogram intersection and histogram difference methods. We compare the proposed method with the conventional methods for 52 video clips, which are coded under varying bit rate, image size, and frame rate. Experimental results show that the proposed method is more efficient than the conventional methods and that the proposed method is more similar to the mean opinion score (MOS) than conventional algorithms.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.710-721
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• 2010

Recently, for the advancement of embedded technology about mobile device, a new kind of service, mash-up is appeared. It is service or application combining multimedia content making tool or device and web-GIS(geographic information system) service in the mobile environment. This service can be ease to use for casual user and can apply in various ways. So, It is served in web 2.0 environment actively. But, in the mashup service, because generated multimedia contents linked with web map are new type of multimedia contents which include user's migration routes in the space such as GPS coordinates. Thus, there are no protection ways for intellectual property created by GIS web-map service users and user's privacy. In this paper, we proposed a location and user information hiding scheme for GIS web-map service. This scheme embeds location and user information into a picture that is taken by camera module on the mobile phone. It is not only protecting way for user's privacy but is also tracing way against illegal photographer who is peeping person through hidden camera. And than, we also realized proposed scheme on the mobile smart phone. For minimizing margin of error about location coordinate value against contents manipulating attacks, GPS information is embedded into chrominance signal of contents considering weight of each digit about binary type of GPS coordinate value. And for tracing illegal photographer, user information such as serial number of mobile phone, phone number and photographing date is embedded into frequency spectrum of contents luminance signal. In the experimental results, we confirmed that the error of extracted information against various image processing attacks is within reliable tolerance. And after file format translation attack, we extracted embedded information from the attacked contents without no damage. Using similarity between extracted one and original templete, we also extracted whole information from damaged chrominance signal of contents by various image processing attacks.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.162-170
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• 2003

The probabilistic anatomical maps are used to localize the functional neuro-images and morphological variability. The quantitative indicator is very important to inquire the anatomical position of an activated legion because functional image data has the low-resolution nature and no inherent anatomical information. Although previously developed MNI probabilistic anatomical map was enough to localize the data, it was not suitable for the Korean brains because of the morphological difference between Occidental and Oriental. In this study, we develop a probabilistic anatomical map for Korean normal brain. Normal 75 blains of T1-weighted spoiled gradient echo magnetic resonance images were acquired on a 1.5-T GESIGNA scanner. Then, a standard brain is selected in the group through a clinician searches a brain of the average property in the Talairach coordinate system. With the standard brain, an anatomist delineates 89 regions of interest (ROI) parcellating cortical and subcortical areas. The parcellated ROIs of the standard are warped and overlapped into each brain by maximizing intensity similarity. And every brain is automatically labeledwith the registered ROIs. Each of the same-labeled region is linearly normalize to the standard brain, and the occurrence of each legion is counted. Finally, 89 probabilistic ROI volumes are generated. This paper presents a probabilistic anatomical map for localizing the functional and structural analysis of Korean normal brain. In the future, we'll develop the group specific probabilistic anatomical maps of OCD and schizophrenia disease.