• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.2483-2504
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• 2023

Most existing low-light enhancement algorithms either use a large number of training parameters or lack generalization to real-world scenarios. This paper presents a novel lightweight and robust pixel-wise polynomial approximation-based deep network for low-light image enhancement. For mapping the low-light image to the enhanced image, pixel-wise higher-order polynomials are employed. A deep convolution network is used to estimate the coefficients of these higher-order polynomials. The proposed network uses multiple branches to estimate pixel values based on different receptive fields. With a smaller receptive field, the first branch enhanced local features, the second and third branches focused on medium-level features, and the last branch enhanced global features. The low-light image is downsampled by the factor of 2b-1 (b is the branch number) and fed as input to each branch. After combining the outputs of each branch, the final enhanced image is obtained. A comprehensive evaluation of our proposed network on six publicly available no-reference test datasets shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both quantitative and qualitative measures.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.36-41
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• 2018

An image intensifying device is equipment that makes weak objects visible in a dark environment, such as making nighttime bright enough to let objects be visually observed. It is possible to obtain a clear image by amplifying the light in the presence of a certain amount of weak light. However, in an extremely low-light environment, where even moonlight is not present, there is not enough light to amplify anything, and the sharpness of the screen deteriorates. In this paper, a method is proposed to improve image quality by using multiple filters and anisotropic diffusion for output noise of the image-intensifying device in extreme low-light environments. For the experiment, the output of the image-intensifying device was obtained under extremely low-light conditions, and signal processing for improving the image quality was performed. The configuration of the filters for signal processing uses anisotropic diffusion after applying a median filter and a Wiener filter for effective removal of salt-and-pepper noise and Gaussian noise, which constitute the main noise appearing in the image. Experimental results show that the improvement visually enhanced image quality. Both peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and SSIM, which are quantitative indicators, show improved values.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.283-289
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• 2010

Recent advance of digital camera results in that image signal processing techniques are widely adopted to railroad security management. However, due to the nature of railroad management many images are acquired in low light level environment such as night scenes. The lack of light causes lots of noise in the image, which degrades image quality and causes errors in the next processes. 3D noise reducing techniques produce better results by using consecutive sequence of images. On the other hand, they cause degradation such as motion blur if there are motions in the sequence. In this paper, we use an adaptive weight filter to estimate more accurate motions and use the result of the adaptive filter to 3D result to improve objective and subjective mage quality.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.357-361
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• 2011

Photon-counting sensing is a widely used technique for low-light-level imaging applications. This paper proposes a distance information extraction method with photon-counting passive sensing under low-lightlevel conditions. The photo-counting passive sensing combined with integral imaging generates a photon-limited elemental image array. Maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to reconstruct the photon-limited image at certain depth levels. The distance information is extracted at the depth level that minimizes the sum of the standard deviation of the corresponding photo-events in the elemental image array. Experimental and simulation results confirm that the proposed method can extract the distance information of the object under low-light-level conditions.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.437-440
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• 2022

In modern society, the use of the image processing field is increasing rapidly due to the 4th industrial revolution and the development of IoT technology. In particular, edge detection is widely used in various fields as an essential preprocessing process in image processing applications such as image classification and object detection. Conventional methods for detecting an edge include a Sobel edge detection filter, a Roberts edge detection filter, a Prewitt edge detection filter, Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG), and the like. However, existing methods have the disadvantage of showing somewhat insufficient performance of edge detection characteristics in a low-light level environment with low contrast. Therefore, this paper proposes an edge detection algorithm based on contrast analysis to increase edge detection characteristics even in low-light level environments.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.17-26
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• 2012

This paper presents an image processing-based validation method for unrecognizable numbers in severely distorted license plate images which have been degraded by various factors including low-resolution, low light-level, geometric distortion, and periodic noise. Existing vehicle license plate recognition (LPR) methods assume that most of the image degradation factors have been removed before performing the recognition of printed numbers and letters. If this is not the case, conventional LPR becomes impossible. The proposed method adopts a novel approach where a set of reference number images are intentionally degraded using the same factors estimated from the input image. After a series of image processing steps, including geometric transformation, super-resolution, and filtering, a comparison using cross-correlation between the intentionally degraded reference and the input images can provide a successful identification of the visually unrecognizable numbers. The proposed method makes it possible to validate numbers in a license plate image taken under low light-level conditions. In the experiment, using an extended set of test images that are unrecognizable to human vision, the proposed method provides a successful recognition rate of over 95%, whereas most existing LPR methods fail due to the severe distortion.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.1680-1686
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• 2015

Edge detection is an essential preprocessing for most image processing application, and there are several existing detection methods such as Sobel, Roberts, Laplacian, LoG(Laplacian of Gaussian) operators, etc. Those existing edge detection methods have not given satisfactory results since they do not offer enough pixel brightness change in low light level environment. Therefore, in this study new algorithms using brightness transfer function in the preprocessing and for edge detection applying standard deviation and average-weighted local masks are proposed. In addition, the performance of proposed algorithms was evaluated in comparison with the existing edge detection methods such as Sobel, Roberts, Prewitt, Laplacian, LoG operators.

• Journal of Internet of Things and Convergence
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.51-60
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• 2024

Aiming at the problem of low contrast and difficult to recognize video images in low-light environment, we propose an adaptive contrast compensation enhancement algorithm based on human visual perception. First of all, the video image characteristic factors in low-light environment are extracted: AL (average luminance), ABWF (average bandwidth factor), and the mathematical model of human visual CRC(contrast resolution compensation) is established according to the difference of the original image's grayscale/chromaticity level, and the proportion of the three primary colors of the true color is compensated by the integral, respectively. Then, when the degree of compensation is lower than the bright vision precisely distinguishable difference, the compensation threshold is set to linearly compensate the bright vision to the full bandwidth. Finally, the automatic optimization model of the compensation ratio coefficient is established by combining the subjective image quality evaluation and the image characteristic factor. The experimental test results show that the video image adaptive enhancement algorithm has good enhancement effect, good real-time performance, can effectively mine the dark vision information, and can be widely used in different scenes.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.1131-1134
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• 2008

In this invited paper, numerical reconstruction and pattern recognition using integral imaging are overviewed. The computational integral imaging method reconstructs three-dimensional information at arbitrary depth-levels. Photon-counting nonlinear matched filtering combined with the computational reconstruction provides promising results for the application of low-light level recognition.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.246-253
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• 2016

Infrared (IR) imaging has been researched for various applications such as surveillance. IR radiation has the capability to detect thermal characteristics of objects under low-light conditions. However, automatic segmentation for finding the object of interest would be challenging since the IR detector often provides the low spatial and contrast resolution image without color and texture information. Another hindrance is that the image can be degraded by noise and clutters. This paper proposes multi-level segmentation for extracting regions of interest (ROIs) and objects of interest (OOIs) in the IR scene. Each level of the multi-level segmentation is composed of a k-means clustering algorithm, an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, and a decision process. The k-means clustering initializes the parameters of the Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and the EM algorithm estimates those parameters iteratively. During the multi-level segmentation, the area extracted at one level becomes the input to the next level segmentation. Thus, the segmentation is consecutively performed narrowing the area to be processed. The foreground objects are individually extracted from the final ROI windows. In the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using several IR images, in which human subjects are captured at a long distance. The average probability of error is shown to be lower than that obtained from other conventional methods such as Gonzalez, Otsu, k-means, and EM methods.