• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.96.5-96
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• 2002

This paper describes extraction procedures for the center coordinates of steam generator tubes of Youngkwang nuclear power plant No. 6 unit. The centering coordinates of tubes are needed for monitoring whether ECT probe is exactly inserted into tube or not. However, The tube image tends to have poor contrast because steam generator bowl is sealed. The centering coordinates extraction procedure consists of two steps. The first step is to process the region with high contrast in entire image of steam generator tubes. Using the center points extracted in the first step and the geometry of tubes lined up in regular triangle patterns the centering coordinates of the rest region with low contrast...

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.309-310
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• 2006

This paper presents an enhanced algorithm for compensating the visual quality in backlight image. Current cameras do not represent all details of scene into human's eye. Saturation and underexposure are common problems in backlight image. Retinex algorithm, derived from Land's theory on human visual perception is known to be effective in enhancing the contrast. However, its weaknesses are long processing time and low contrast of bright area in backlight scene because of compensating the details of dark area. In this paper, K-Retinex algorithm is proposed to reduce the processing time and enhance the contrast in both dark and bright area. To show the superiority of proposed algorithm, we compare the processing time and local variance of each area above.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1904-1926
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• 2016

Iris recognition for biometric personnel identification has gained much interest owing to the increasing concern with security today. The image quality plays a major role in the performance of iris recognition systems. When capturing an iris image under uncontrolled conditions and dealing with non-cooperative people, the chance of getting non-ideal images is very high owing to poor focus, off-angle, noise, motion blur, occlusion of eyelashes and eyelids, and wearing glasses. In order to improve the accuracy of iris recognition while dealing with non-ideal iris images, we propose a novel algorithm that improves the quality of degraded iris images. First, the iris image is localized properly to obtain accurate iris boundary detection, and then the iris image is normalized to obtain a fixed size. Second, the valid region (iris region) is extracted from the segmented iris image to obtain only the iris region. Third, to get a well-distributed texture image, bilinear interpolation is used on the segmented valid iris gray image. Using contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) enhances the low contrast of the resulting interpolated image. The results of CLAHE are further improved by stretching the maximum and minimum values to 0-255 by using histogram-stretching technique. The gray texture information is extracted by 1D Gabor filters while the Hamming distance technique is chosen as a metric for recognition. The NICE-II training dataset taken from UBRIS.v2 was used for the experiment. Results of the proposed method outperformed other methods in terms of equal error rate (EER).

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.131-138
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• 2021

Objective: Iterative reconstruction degrades image quality. Thus, further advances in image reconstruction are necessary to overcome some limitations of this technique in low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scan of the chest. Deep-learning image reconstruction (DLIR) is a new method used to reduce dose while maintaining image quality. The purposes of this study was to evaluate image quality and noise of LDCT scan images reconstructed with DLIR and compare with those of images reconstructed with the adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction-Veo at a level of 30% (ASiR-V 30%). Materials and Methods: This retrospective study included 58 patients who underwent LDCT scan for lung cancer screening. Datasets were reconstructed with ASiR-V 30% and DLIR at medium and high levels (DLIR-M and DLIR-H, respectively). The objective image signal and noise, which represented mean attenuation value and standard deviation in Hounsfield units for the lungs, mediastinum, liver, and background air, and subjective image contrast, image noise, and conspicuity of structures were evaluated. The differences between CT scan images subjected to ASiR-V 30%, DLIR-M, and DLIR-H were evaluated. Results: Based on the objective analysis, the image signals did not significantly differ among ASiR-V 30%, DLIR-M, and DLIR-H (p = 0.949, 0.737, 0.366, and 0.358 in the lungs, mediastinum, liver, and background air, respectively). However, the noise was significantly lower in DLIR-M and DLIR-H than in ASiR-V 30% (all p < 0.001). DLIR had higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) than ASiR-V 30% (p = 0.027, < 0.001, and < 0.001 in the SNR of the lungs, mediastinum, and liver, respectively; all p < 0.001 in the CNR). According to the subjective analysis, DLIR had higher image contrast and lower image noise than ASiR-V 30% (all p < 0.001). DLIR was superior to ASiR-V 30% in identifying the pulmonary arteries and veins, trachea and bronchi, lymph nodes, and pleura and pericardium (all p < 0.001). Conclusion: DLIR significantly reduced the image noise in chest LDCT scan images compared with ASiR-V 30% while maintaining superior image quality.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.10
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• pp.77-83
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• 2016

This paper presents an adaptive retinex algorithm using skewness for contrast enhancement of color images. In order to estimate the degree of low contrast of an image, skewness of luminance of an observed image is used to define a parameter, and a non-linear function is proposed to compensate the reflectance using the parameter and estimated reflectance. In addition, determination of gain and offset of the non-linear function is addressed using statistics of the estimated reflectance. The relation between an observed luminance and the compensated luminance is used to compensate color components with the reduction of computational cost. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has the capability to effectively improve the contrast without color distortion.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.97-103
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• 2017

Thermal imaging is mainly used in military equipment required for night observation. In particular, technologies of uncooled thermal imaging detectors are being developed as applied to low-cost night observation system. Many system integrators require different specifications of the uncooled thermal imaging camera but their development time is short. In this approach, EOSYSTEM has developed a small size, TEC-less uncooled thermal imaging camera module with $32{\times}32mm$ size and low power consumption. Both domestic detector and import detector are applied to the EOSYSTEM's thermal imaging camera module. The camera module contains efficient infrared image processing algorithms including : Temperature compensation non-uniformity correction, Bad/Dead pixel replacement, Column noise removal, Contrast/Edge enhancement algorithms providing stable and low residual non-uniformity infrared image.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.1378-1387
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• 2013

Histogram equalization, which stretches the dynamic range of intensity, is the most common method for enhancing the contrast of image. Contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization(CLAHE), proposed by K. Zuierveld, has two key parameters: block size and clip limit. These parameters mainly control image quality, but have been heuristically determined by user. In this paper, we propose a novel method of determining two parameters of CLAHE using entropy of image. The key idea is based on the characteristics of entropy curves: clip limit vs entropy and block size vs entropy. Clip limit and block size are determined at the point with maximum curvature on entropy curve. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves images with very low contrast.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.26-31
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• 2009

This paper describes a new image watermarking scheme invariant to rotation, scaling and translation (RST) attacks. For obtaining the invariance properties we propose to present an image of watermark by wedges and rings to convert its rotation to shift and then utilize the shift invariance property of the Direct Fourier Transform (DFT). But in contrast to conversional schemes based on the Fourier-Mellin transform (FMT), we do not use a log-polar mapping (LPM). As a result, our scheme preserves high quality of original image since it is not underwent to LPM For withstanding against JPEG compression, noise addition and low-pass (LP) filtering attacks a low frequency watermark is embedded into middle frequencies of the original image. Experiments with various attacks show the robustness of the proposed scheme.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.99-107
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• 2019

Retinex-based image enhancement is a technique that utilizes the property that the human visual characteristics are sensitive to the difference from the surrounding pixel value rather than the pixel value itself. These Retinex-based algorithms show different characteristics of the improved image depending on the applied color space or gamma correction. In this paper, we set eight different experimental conditions according to the application of color space and gamma correction, and analyze the objective and subjective performance of each Retinex based image enhancement algorithm and apply it to the implementation of Retinex based algorithm. In the case of gamma correction, quantitative low entropy images and low contrast images are obtained. The application of Retinex technique in HSI color space rather than RGB color space is found to be high in overall subjective image quality as well as maintaining color.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.1-6
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose an image enhancement method for vehicle recorder by dividing the images into sub-images and finding local histograms of the sub-images. The proposed method includes the following steps. Firstly, the input image is divided into ($N{\times}M$) pieces. And the sub-images are used to make groups using the adjacent piece-images (eg. piece-imagei,j, piece-imagei,j+1, piece-imagei+1,j and piece-imagei+1,j+1). Secondly, the contrast enhancement processes are executed using the local histogram of the sub-images. Finally, overall image is reconstructed by using a transfer function that reflects the characteristics of the sub-image. The proposed method might achieve more enhanced images for vehicle recorder by suppressing excessive image contrast.