• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.446-455
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• 2017

A color image compression based on saliency map was proposed. The proposed method provides higher quality in saliency blocks on which people's attention focuses, compared with non-saliency blocks on which the attention less focuses at a given bitrate. The proposed method uses 3 different quantization tables according to each block's saliency level. In the experiment using 6 typical images, we compared the proposed method with JPEG and other conventional methods. As the result, it showed that the proposed method (Qup=0.5*Qx) is about 3.1 to 1.2 dB better than JPEG and others in saliency blocks in PSNR at the almost similar bitrate. In the comparison of result images, the proposed one also showed less error than others in saliency blocks.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.118-126
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• 2020

In this paper, we present an effective single image fog removal by using the Joint Bright and Dark Channel (JBDC) and pixel-based transmission estimation to enhance the visibility of outdoor images susceptible to degradation due to weather and environmental conditions. The conventional methods include refinement process of coarse transmission with heavy computational complexity. The proposed transmission estimation reveals excellent edge-preserving performance and does not require the refinement process. We estimate the atmospheric light in pixel-based fashion, which can improve the transmission estimation performance and visual quality of the restored image. Moreover, we propose an adaptive transmission estimation to enhance the visual quality specifically in sky regions. Comprehensive experiments on various fog images show that the proposed method exhibits reduced computational complexity and excellent fog removal performance, compared with the existing methods; thus, it can be applied to various fields including real-time devices.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.413-423
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• 2016

Worldview-3 satellite sensor provides panchromatic image with high-spatial resolution and 8-band multispectral images. Therefore, an image-sharpening technique, which sharpens the spatial resolution of multispectral images by using high-spatial resolution panchromatic images, is essential for various applications of Worldview-3 images based on image interpretation and processing. The existing pansharpening algorithms tend to tradeoff between spectral distortion and spatial enhancement. In this study, we applied six pansharpening algorithms to Worldview-3 satellite imagery and assessed the quality of pansharpened images qualitatively and quantitatively. We also analyzed the effects of time lag for each multispectral band during the pansharpening process. Quantitative assessment of pansharpened images was performed by comparing ERGAS (Erreur Relative Globale Adimensionnelle de Synthèse), SAM (Spectral Angle Mapper), Q-index and sCC (spatial Correlation Coefficient) based on real data set. In experiment, quantitative results obtained by MRA (Multi-Resolution Analysis)-based algorithm were better than those by the CS (Component Substitution)-based algorithm. Nevertheless, qualitative quality of spectral information was similar to each other. In addition, images obtained by the CS-based algorithm and by division of two multispectral sensors were shaper in terms of spatial quality than those obtained by the other pansharpening algorithm. Therefore, there is a need to determine a pansharpening method for Worldview-3 images for application to remote sensing data, such as spectral and spatial information-based applications.

• Imaging Science in Dentistry
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.183-190
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• 2012

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the level of clinical image quality of panoramic radiographs and to analyze the parameters that influence the overall image quality. Materials and Methods: Korean dental clinics were asked to provide three randomly selected panoramic radiographs. An oral and maxillofacial radiology specialist evaluated those images using our self-developed Clinical Image Quality Evaluation Chart. Three evaluators classified the overall image quality of the panoramic radiographs and evaluated the causes of imaging errors. Results: A total of 297 panoramic radiographs were collected from 99 dental hospitals and clinics. The mean of the scores according to the Clinical Image Quality Evaluation Chart was 79.9. In the classification of the overall image quality, 17 images were deemed 'optimal for obtaining diagnostic information,' 153 were 'adequate for diagnosis,' 109 were 'poor but diagnosable,' and nine were 'unrecognizable and too poor for diagnosis'. The results of the analysis of the causes of the errors in all the images are as follows: 139 errors in the positioning, 135 in the processing, 50 from the radiographic unit, and 13 due to anatomic abnormality. Conclusion: Panoramic radiographs taken at local dental clinics generally have a normal or higher-level image quality. Principal factors affecting image quality were positioning of the patient and image density, sharpness, and contrast. Therefore, when images are taken, the patient position should be adjusted with great care. Also, standardizing objective criteria of image density, sharpness, and contrast is required to evaluate image quality effectively.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.453-467
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• 2014

A typical histogram equalization contrast enhancement effect for improving the image quality is excellent. However, because it appears that excessive changes of the brightness values, The average brightness of the image is changing in units of frames of applications such as a TV video is unsuitable. In order to solve these drawbacks, a modified method of histogram equalization on various studies have been made. But the result images of existing methods sometimes shown visual degradations such as over-enhancement and false contouring. In this paper, we propose improved contrast enhancement method through bi-histogram equalization using target mean brightness based on differential compression method. The proposed method is based on the average brightness value by dividing the histogram, the histogram for each zone, according to the frequency differential of compression. And equalize the modified histogram based on target mean brightness. This allows to suppress deterioration of picture quality, and changes in the average brightness of each frame of video, while maintaining and improving the contrast. Experimental results show that the proposed method compared to the conventional method, the average brightness of each frame from a movie well maintained, and no degradation of the image quality showed a good effect to improve the contrast.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.73-80
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• 2006

Fingerprint-based verification system has been used for a very long time. Because of their well-known uniqueness and immutability, fingerprint is one of the most widely used biometric features. However, fingerprint identification system has such a critical weakness that the performance of verification is reduced drastically for a poor input fingerprint. In this paper, an image enhancement algorithm using enhanced direction and enhanced binary and aiming image is used to mitigate the problem in the preprocessing. The goal of image enhancement is to estimate the quality of input fingerprint image and to improve the clarity of ridge and valley structures of input fingerprint image. Also, a ridge orientation extraction method using index table is proposed to improve the speed of verification. It is shown by the experiments that proposed fingerprint verification system improves the minutiae extraction accuracy and performance of verification.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.76-80
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• 2018

In recent years, with the development of automobile technology, smart system technology that assists safe driving has been developed. A camera is installed on the front and rear of the vehicle as well as on the left and right sides to detect and warn of collision risks and hazards. Beyond the technology of simple black-box recording via cameras, we are developing intelligent systems that combine various computer vision technologies. However, most related studies have been developed to optimize performance in laboratory-like environments that do not take environmental factors such as weather into account. In this paper, we propose a method to detect object by restoring visibility in image with degraded image due to weather factors such as fog. First, the image quality degradation such as fog is detected in a single image, and the image quality is improved by restoring using an intermediate value filter. Then, we used an adaptive feature extraction method that removes unnecessary elements such as noise from the improved image and uses it to recognize objects with only the necessary features. In the proposed method, it is shown that more feature points are extracted than the feature points of the region of interest in the improved image.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.8
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• pp.2068-2082
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• 2023

With the rapid development of deep learning, Depth Map Super-Resolution (DMSR) method has achieved more advanced performances. However, when the upsampling rate is very large, it is difficult to capture the structural consistency between color features and depth features by these DMSR methods. Therefore, we propose a color-image guided DMSR method based on iterative depth feature enhancement. Considering the feature difference between high-quality color features and low-quality depth features, we propose to decompose the depth features into High-Frequency (HF) and Low-Frequency (LF) components. Due to structural homogeneity of depth HF components and HF color features, only HF color features are used to enhance the depth HF features without using the LF color features. Before the HF and LF depth feature decomposition, the LF component of the previous depth decomposition and the updated HF component are combined together. After decomposing and reorganizing recursively-updated features, we combine all the depth LF features with the final updated depth HF features to obtain the enhanced-depth features. Next, the enhanced-depth features are input into the multistage depth map fusion reconstruction block, in which the cross enhancement module is introduced into the reconstruction block to fully mine the spatial correlation of depth map by interleaving various features between different convolution groups. Experimental results can show that the two objective assessments of root mean square error and mean absolute deviation of the proposed method are superior to those of many latest DMSR methods.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.157-165
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• 2023

Ultrasound imaging uses sound waves of frequencies to cause physical actions such as reflection, absorption, refraction, and transmission at the edge between different tissues. Improvement is needed because there is a lot of noise due to the characteristics of the data generated from the ultrasound equipment, and it is difficult to grasp the shape of the tissue to be actually observed because the edge is vague. The edge enhancement method is used as a method to solve the case where the edge surface looks clumped due to a decrease in image quality. In this paper, as a method to strengthen the interface, the quality improvement was confirmed by strengthening the interface, which is the high-frequency part, in each image using an unsharpening mask and high boost. The mask filtering used for each image was evaluated by measuring PSNR and SNR. Abdominal, head, heart, liver, kidney, breast, and fetal images were obtained from Philips epiq5g and affiniti70g and Alpinion E-cube 15 ultrasound equipment. The program used to implement the algorithm was implemented with MATLAB R2022a of MathWorks. The unsharpening and high-boost mask array size was set to 3*3, and the laplacian filter, a spatial filter used to create outline-enhanced images, was applied equally to both masks. ImageJ program was used for quantitative evaluation of image quality. As a result of applying the mask filter to various ultrasound images, the subjective image quality showed that the overall contour lines of the image were clearly visible when unsharpening and high-boost mask were applied to the original image. When comparing the quantitative image quality, the image quality of the image to which the unsharpening mask and the high boost mask were applied was evaluated higher than that of the original image. In the portal vein, head, gallbladder, and kidney images, the SNR, PSNR, RMSE and MAE of the image to which the high-boost mask was applied were measured to be high. Conversely, for images of the heart, breast, and fetus, SNR, PSNR, RMSE and MAE values were measured as images with the unsharpening mask applied. It is thought that using the optimal mask according to the image will help to improve the image quality, and the contour information was provided to improve the image quality.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.63 no.9
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• pp.1281-1285
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• 2014

Recently, as the wide spread of smart phone, pico projector which is used at the smart phone is appeared as a portable display device. In this paper, among several pico projectors, laser beam scanner module is dealt with in which laser is used as light source, and mems-mirror is used as optical panel. In this device, screen image quality is a special issue, and blur effect is a typical adverse effect to the quality of this device. So the enhancement of this blur effect has an important factor of the quality of the device. The definition of the blur and the main source of the blur are studied and the simulation results and way of improvement are also suggested.