• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.10B no.6
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• pp.629-638
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose an improved method of watermarking to increase the invisibility of a watermark and robustness against attacks for the purpose of removing the embedded watermark. The proposed method adaptively selects DCT blocks and determines position and intensity for watermarking based on the characteristics of human visual system. The used features are texture, luminance and contrast. We show the experimental results against image processing attacks such as cropping, image enhancement, low pass filtering, and JPEG compression, and then discuss the performance of the proposed method.

• Journal of Veterinary Clinics
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.135-142
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• 2021

The aim of this study was to evaluate the contrast effect if a saline flush following low-volume contrast medium bolus improves vascular and parenchymal enhancement using a saphenous vein in abdominal CT for small animals. Six clinically healthy beagle dogs underwent abdominal contrast-enhanced CT. They were divided into nine groups (each group, n = 6), according to the volume of contrast medium 1, 2, and 3 mL/kg, and volume of the saline solution 0, 5, and 10 mL. Dynamic CT scanning was performed at the hepatic hilum level. The maximum contrast enhancement, time to maximum enhancement, and time to equilibrium phase were calculated from the time attenuation curves. Mean attenuation values for all groups were measured in the aorta, portal vein, and liver. After contrast enhancement, grading of image quality regarding surrounding artifacts and evaluation of the hepatic hilum structures was performed. For comparison of the effect of the contrast material and saline solution doses, differences in mean attenuation values between the contrast medium 2 mL/kg without saline flush group and the remaining groups, and between contrast medium 3 mL/kg without saline flush group and the remaining groups, were analyzed for statistical significance. There were no significant differences between with and without saline flushing at the same contrast medium dose groups. There were no significant differences in peak values between the 3 mL/kg dose of contrast medium alone and the 2 mL/kg dose of contrast medium with saline solution flush. However, there was a significant difference in peak values between the 3 mL/kg dose of the contrast medium without the saline flush group and the 2 mL/kg dose of the contrast medium alone group. Grades of the artifacts were not significantly different in the saline flush regardless of the dose of the contrast medium. Using 2 mL/kg of contrast medium with saline solution flush resulted in similar liver parenchyma attenuation, compared with using 3 mL/kg of contrast medium without saline solution flush. In CT evaluation of hepatic parenchymal diseases, using 2 mL/kg of contrast medium with saline solution flush may yield decreased risk of contrast nephropathy and cost-saving.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.858-862
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• 2015

This paper presents a new forward-viewing mono-camera based obstacle detection algorithm for mobile robots. The proposed method extracts the coarse location of an obstacle in an image using inverse perspective mapping technique from sequential images. In the next step, graph-cut based image labeling is conducted for estimating the exact obstacle boundary. The graph-cut based labeling algorithm labels the image pixels as either obstacle or floor as the final outcome. Experiments are performed to verify the obstacle detection performance of the developed algorithm in several examples, including a book, box, towel, and flower pot. The low illumination condition, low color contrast between floor and obstacle, and floor pattern cases are also tested.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.1075-1085
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• 2012

In clinical research using medical images, the image segmentation is one of the most important processes. Especially, the hippocampal atrophy is helpful for the clinical Alzheimer diagnosis as a specific marker of the progress of Alzheimer. In order to measure hippocampus volume exactly, segmentation of the hippocampus is essential. However, the hippocampus has some features like relatively low contrast, low signal-to-noise ratio, discreted boundary in MRI images, and these features make it difficult to segment hippocampus. To solve this problem, firstly, We selected region of interest from an experiment image, subtracted a original image from the negative image of the original image, enhanced contrast, and applied anisotropic diffusion filtering and gaussian filtering as preprocessing. Finally, We performed an image segmentation using two level set methods. Through a variety of approaches for the validation of proposed hippocampus segmentation method, We confirmed that our proposed method improved the rate and accuracy of the segmentation. Consequently, the proposed method is suitable for segmentation of the area which has similar features with the hippocampus. We believe that our method has great potential if successfully combined with other research findings.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.5 no.9
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• pp.1613-1631
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• 2011

Several metrics have been reported in the literature to assess stereo image quality, mostly based on visual attention or human visual sensitivity based distortion prediction with the help of disparity information, which do not consider the combined aspects of human visual processing. In this paper, visual attention and depth assisted stereo image quality assessment model (VAD-SIQAM) is devised that consists of three main components, i.e., stereo attention predictor (SAP), depth variation (DV), and stereo distortion predictor (SDP). Visual attention is modeled based on entropy and inverse contrast to detect regions or objects of interest/attention. Depth variation is fused into the attention probability to account for the amount of changed depth in distorted stereo images. Finally, the stereo distortion predictor is designed by integrating distortion probability, which is based on low-level human visual system (HVS), responses into actual attention probabilities. The results show that regions of attention are detected among the visually significant distortions in the stereo image pair. Drawbacks of human visual sensitivity based picture quality metrics are alleviated by integrating visual attention and depth information. We also show that positive correlation with ground-truth attention and depth maps are increased by up to 0.949 and 0.936 in terms of the Pearson and the Spearman correlation coefficients, respectively.

• 연구논문집
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• s.25
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• pp.147-154
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• 1995

In this paper, we discussed the convergence and the properties of an iterative algorithm method in order to improve a bimean clustering algorithm. This algorithm that we have discussed choose automatically an optimum threshold as a result of an iterative process, successive iterations providing increasingly cleaner extractions of the object region, The iterative approach of a proposed algorithm is seen to select an appropriate threshold for the low contrast images.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2013.05a
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• pp.43-44
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• 2013

In my paper, an evaluation method on naturalness and urbanness characterizations of animation image is proposed. In contrast to the prior works, we intend to give the exact degree of naturalness and urbanness by combining the low-level visual feature-based schemes with the biological visual schemes. In our method, four descriptors are extracted and pseudoinverse is adopted. By this method, we can experiment on the exact degree of naturalness and urbanness with satisfactory results.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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• 2004.04a
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• pp.188-191
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• 2004

야간에 비디오카메라로 촬영시 열악한 주위 환경과 영상 전송에 기인하여 다양한 잡음에 의하여 왜곡되거나 흐린 저대비(low contrast)영상을 가질 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 획득한 저대비 영상을 대비 향상시켜주는 기법을 제안한다. 동영상 압축표준인 MPEG-2는 인간의 시각 특성상 색차(chrominance)신호보다 밝기(luminance)신호에 더 민감하기 때문에 밝기신호와 색차 신호를 분리하여 압축한다. 밝기신호만을 추출한 후 K-means 알고리듬을 사용하여 교차점을 자동으로 선정하는 방법을 사용하는데, 이 최적의 교차점을 선정하는 과정은 획득한 영상을 물체와 배경으로 분리하는 두 개의 클래스 문제로 보고 K-means 알고리듬을 적용하였고 구한 교차점을 사용하여 영상을 양분하여 히스토그램 평활화 방법을 적용하였다 븐 논문에서는 퍼지성 지수(index of fuzziness)를 사용하여 향상의 정도를 측정하였다. 제안된 기법을 저대비 영상에 적용하였으며 그 결과를 히스토그램 평활화 기법의 결과와 비교하였다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2012.06b
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• pp.483-485
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• 2012

본 논문에서는 수중 영상 환경에 특화된 자동 수중 영상 보정 시스템을 제안한다. 수중 영상은 빛 희석(light attenuation)을 인한 가시거리 제한, 낮은 영상 대비(low contrast) 그리고 부유물질과 같은 영상의 노이즈 등의 특수한 환경적 제약이 따른다. 기존의 수중 영상 보정 알고리즘은 색 및 대비(contrast) 보정, 가시거리 확장 및 노이즈 제거 기법등을 이용한 부분적으로 보정 연구가 진행되어 왔는데, 부분적 영상 보정 기법으로는 선명한 영상의 결과를 얻기 힘들다. 제안한 통합 수중 영상 보정 시스템은 색 및 대비 보정, 부유물질 제거를 위한 노이즈 필터링, 객체 윤곽선 강화를 위한 기법들을 통합하여 수중 영상에 특화하였다. 실험을 통하여 제안된 수중 영상 보정 시스템의 효율성을 확인하였다.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.14-19
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• 2017

In this paper, a fused illumination mechanism for detecting surface defects in steel plates was designed by applying the discriminant function that can differentiate the contrast of defects and non-defects. There is low contrast, non-uniformity, and no feature characteristics in steel plate surfaces. The fused illumination mechanism is devised, based on those characteristics. Optimum parameters of the fused illumination mechanism are determined by applying the discriminant function after acquiring the defect image in steel plate surfaces. The performance of the proposed mechanism is verified by experminets.