• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.16 no.11
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• pp.1250-1260
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• 2013

The contrast enhancement techniques based on Laplacian pyramid image fusion have a benefit that they can faithfully describe the image information because they combine the multiple resource images by selecting the desired pixel in each image. However, they also have some problem that the output image may contain noise, because the methods evaluate the visual information on the basis of each pixel. In this paper, an improved contrast enhancement method, which effectively suppresses the noise, using image fusion is proposed. The proposed method combines the resource images by making Laplacian pyramids generated from weight maps, which are produced by measuring the difference between the block-based local well exposedness and local homogeneity for each resource image. We showed the proposed method could produce less noisy images compared to the conventional techniques in the test for various images.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.52-58
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• 2014

Exact histogram specification (EHS) transforms the histogram of an input image into the specified histogram. In the conventional EHS techniques, the pixels are first sorted according to their graylevels, and the pixels that have the same graylevel are further differentiated according to the local average of the pixel values and the edge strength. The strictly ordered pixels are then mapped to the desired histogram. However, since the conventional sorting method is inherently dependent on the initial graylevel-based sorting, the contrast enhancement capability of the conventional EHS algorithms is restricted. We propose a modified EHS algorithm considering the just noticeable difference. In the proposed algorithm, the edge pixels are pre-processed such that the output edge pixels obtained by the modified EHS can result in the local contrast enhancement. Moreover, we introduce a new sorting method for the pixels that have the same graylevel. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides better image enhancement performance compared to the conventional EHS algorithms.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.737-745
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• 2008

In this paper, a novel neighborhood metric of histogram equalization (HE) algorithm for contrast enhancement is presented. We present a refinement of HE using neighborhood metrics with a general framework which orders pixels based on a sequence of sorting functions which uses both global and local information to remap the image greylevels. We tested a novel sorting key with the suggestion of using the original image greylevel as the primary key and a novel neighborhood distinction metric as the secondary key, and compared HE using proposed distinction metric and other HE methods such as global histogram equalization (GHE), HE using voting metric and HE using contrast difference metric. We found that our method can preserve advantages of other metrics, while reducing drawbacks of them and avoiding undesirable over-enhancement that can occur with local histogram equalization (LHE) and other methods.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2009.01a
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• pp.59-62
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• 2009

In general, as a dynamic range of digital still camera is narrower than a real scene‘s, it is hard to represent the shadow region of scene. Thus, multi-scaled retinex algorithm is used to improve detail and local contrast of the shadow region in an image by dividing the image by its local average images through Gaussian filtering. However, if the chromatic distribution of the original image is not uniform and dominated by a certain chromaticity, the chromaticity of the local average image depends on the dominant chromaticity of original image, thereby the colors of the resulting image are shifted to a complement color to the dominant chromaticity. In this paper, a modified multi-scaled retinex method to reduce the influence of the dominant chromaticity is proposed. In multi-scaled retinex process, the local average images obtained by Gaussian filtering are divided by the average chromaticity values of the original image in order to reduce the influence of dominant chromaticity. Next, the chromaticity of illuminant is estimated in highlight region and the local average images are corrected by the estimated chromaticity of illuminant. In experiment, results show that the proposed method improved the local contrast and detail without color distortion.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.31B no.8
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• pp.181-191
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• 1994

A new method for enhancing blurred images using fuzzy logic concepts is proposed. Blurred images contain blurred boundaries which make it difficult to detect edges and segment areas in images. In order to sharpen blurred edges local contrast information of an image and erosion/dilation properties of local min/max operations are used in which local min/max operations are fuzzy logic operations. so that given images are transformed to fuzzy images and then these operations are applied on them. In this method the sharpening operation can be iteratively applied to the image to get better deblurring effect and gray-scale "salt-and-pepper" noises are suppressed. the efficiency of our algorithm is demonstrated through experimental results obtained with artificially-made blurred images and real blurred images.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.539-557
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• 2013

A novel multifocus image fusion algorithm based on NSCT is proposed in this paper. In order to not only attain the image focusing properties and more visual information in the fused image, but also sensitive to the human visual perception, a local multidirection variance (LEOV) fusion rule is proposed for lowpass subband coefficient. In order to introduce more visual saliency, a modified local contrast is defined. In addition, according to the feature of distribution of highpass subband coefficients, a direction vector is proposed to constrain the modified local contrast and construct the new fusion rule for highpass subband coefficients selection The NSCT is a flexible multiscale, multidirection, and shift-invariant tool for image decomposition, which can be implemented via the atrous algorithm. The proposed fusion algorithm based on NSCT not only can prevent artifacts and erroneous from introducing into the fused image, but also can eliminate 'block effect' and 'frequency aliasing' phenomenon. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved better fusion results than wavelet-based and CT-based fusion method in contrast and clarity.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.56-65
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• 2004

In this paper, we proposed the detection algorithm of microcalcification based on region growing method with contrast and edge sharpness in digital X-ray mammographic images. We extracted the local maximum pixel and watershed regions by using watershed algorithm. Then, we used the mean slope between local maximum and neighborhood pixels to extract microcalcification candidate pixels among local maximum pixels. During increasing threshold value to grow microcalcification region, at the maximum threshold value of the contrast and edge sharpness, the microcalcification area is decided. The regions of which area of grown candidate microcalfication region is larger than that of watershed region are excluded from microcalcifications. We showed the diagnosis algorithm can be used to aid diagnostic-radiologist in the early detection breast cancer.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.608-617
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• 2017

Methods of contrast enhancement have problem such as side effect of over-enhancement with non-gaussian histogram distribution, tradeoff enhancement efficiency against brightness preserving. In order to enhance contrast at various histogram distribution, segmentation to region with gaussian distribution and then enhance contrast each region. First, we segment an image into several regions using GMM(Gaussian Mixture Model)fitting by that k-mean clustering and EM(Expectation-Maximization) in $L^*a^*b^*$ color space. As a result region segmentation, we get the region map and probability map. Then we apply local contrast enhancement algorithm that mean shift to minimum overlapping of each region and preserve brightness histogram equalization. Experiment result show that proposed region based contrast enhancement method compare to the conventional method as AMBE(AbsoluteMean Brightness Error) and AE(Average Entropy), brightness is maintained and represented detail information.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.36S no.12
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• pp.51-57
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• 1999

In this paper, an adaptive thresholding of the nonuniformly contrasted images is proposed through using the contrast pre-enhancement of the local regions and the bilinear interpolation between the local threshold values. The nonuniformly contrasted image is decomposed into 9${\times}$9 sized local regions, and the contrast is enhanced by intensifying the gray level difference of each low contrasted or blurred region. Optimal threshold values are obtained by iterative method from the gray level distribution of each contrast-enhanced local region. Discontinuities are reduced at the region of interest or at the characters by using bilinear interpolation between the neighboring threshold surfaces. Character recognition experiments are conducted using backpropagation neural network on the characters extracted from the nonuniformly contrasted document, PCB, and wafer images binarized through using the proposed thresholding and the conventional thresholding methods, and the results prove the relative effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2015.10a
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• pp.1585-1588
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• 2015

본 논문은 human visual system(HVS)에 따른 주파수 민감도와 공간에서 다양한 특성들을 구현하기 위한 신호처리 방법을 개발하였다. 인간의 눈은 주파수 성분에 따라 민감도가 다르며 초점에서 멀수록 인지 가능한 해상도가 떨어진다. 주파수 민감도를 구현하기 위해서 본 논문은 영상 신호의 에너지 스펙트럼 모양이 contrast sensitivity function(CSF)의 모양이 되도록 하여 영상 신호의 에너지를 증가시켰으며 신호 방향에 적응적인 multiband energy scaling 방법을 개발하였다. 기존의 시스템에서 능률만을 향상시키는 기존의 분석 모델과 비교하면 개발한 방법은 HVS에 좀 더 적절하고 선호되게 영상 신호를 처리할 수 있다.