• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.286-295
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• 2000

We present a novel statistically adaptive method using the Minimum Description Length(MDL) principle for unsupervised segmentation of magnetic resonance(MR) images. In the method, Markov random filed(MRF) modeling of tissue region accounts for random noise. Intensity measurements on the local region defined by a window are modeled by a finite Gaussian mixture, which accounts for image inhomogeneities. The segmentation algorithm is based on an iterative conditional modes(ICM) algorithm, approximately finds maximum ${\alpha}$ posteriori(MAP) estimation, and estimates model parameters on the local region. The size of the window for parameter estimation and segmentation is estimated from the image using the MDL principle. In the experiments, the technique well reflected image characteristic of the local region and showed better results than conventional methods in segmentation of MR images with inhomogeneities, especially.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.518-528
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• 2001

In this paper, we firstly define a new combined segmentation measure and propose a segmentation algorithm using this measure. The combined segmentation measure is a weighted sum of intensity, motion, and a change segmentation measure that is extracted from the resulting image of the proposed change detector. The change segmentation measure is defined as an absolute change value difference between an pixel and its neighboring region from the eroded image, which results from morphological erosion filtering to eliminate many inaccurate components included in the resulting image of a conventional change detector. The change segmentation measure can be used as an efficient segmentation measure for the accurate segmentation of neighboring moving objects and static background regions. Therefore, the proposed combined segmentation measure can determine exact boundaries in the segmentation process of region-based coding even though the estimated motion vectors around the boundaries of moving objects and static background regions are inaccurate and the intensities around the boundaries are similar.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.38-46
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• 2004

Image segmentation is the task which partitions the image into meaningful regions and considered to be one of the most important steps in computer vision and image processing. Image segmentation is also widely used in object-based video compression such as MPEG-4 to extract out the object regions from the given frame. Watershed algorithm is frequently used to obtain the more accurate region boundaries. But, it is well known that the watershed algorithm is extremely sensitive to gradient noise and usually results in oversegmentation. To solve such a problem, we propose an image segmentation method which is robust to noise by using stabilized inverse diffusion equation (SIDE) and is more efficient in segmentation by employing multiresolution approach. In this paper, we apply both the region projection method using labels of adjacent regions and the region merging method based on region adjacency graph (RAG). Experimental results on noisy image show that the oversegmenation is reduced and segmentation efficiency is increased.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.42-47
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• 2007

Video Segmentation is an essential part in region-based video coding and any other fields of the video processing. Among lots of methods proposed so far, the watershed method in which the region growing is performed for the gradient image can produce well-partitioned regions globally without any influence on local noise and extracts accurate boundaries. But, it generates a great number of small regions, which we call over segmentation problem. Therefore we proposes that adaptive trimmed mean filter for resolving the over segmentation of image. Simulation result, we confirm that proposed ATM filter improves the performance to remove noise and reduces damage for the clear degree of image in case of the noise ratio of 20% and over.

• Journal of International Society for Simulation Surgery
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.75-79
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• 2014

Purpose The region growing has a critical problem that it often extract vessels with unexpected objects such as a bone which has a similar intensity characteristics to the vessel. We propose the new method to extract arterial vascular anatomy around the stomach from the CTA volume without the post-processing. Materials and Methods Our method, which is also based on the region growing, requires the two seed points from the use. I automatically extracts perigastric arteries using the adaptive region growing method and it does not need any post-processing. Results The three region growing based methods are used to extract perigastric arteries - the conventional region growings with restrict and loose thresholds each and the proposed method. The 3D visualization from the result of our method shows our method extracted the all required arteries for gastric surgery. Conclusion By extracting perigastric arteries using the proposed method, over-segmentation problem that unexpected anatomical objects such as a rib or backbone are also segmented does not occurs anymore. The proposed method does not need to sensitively determine the thresholds of the similarity function. By visualizing the result, the preoperative simulation of arterial vascular anatomy around the stomach can be possible.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.20-27
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• 2006

Multi-level thresholding is a method that is widely used in image segmentation. However most of the existing methods are not suited to be directly used in applicable fields and moreover expanded until a step of image segmentation. This paper proposes region-based multi-level thresholding as an image segmentation method. At first we classify pixels of each color channel to two clusters by using EWFCM(Entropy-based Weighted Fuzzy C-Means) algorithm that is an improved FCM algorithm with spatial information between pixels. To obtain better segmentation results, a reduction of clusters is then performed by a region-based reclassification step based on a similarity between regions existing in a cluster and the other clusters. The clusters are created using the classification information of pixels according to color channel. We finally perform a region merging by Bayesian algorithm based on Kullback-Leibler distance between a region and the neighboring regions as a post-processing method as many regions still exist in image. Experiments show that region-based multi-level thresholding is superior to cluster-, pixel-based multi-level thresholding, and the existing mettled. And much better segmentation results are obtained by the post-processing method.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2001.09a
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• pp.283-286
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• 2001

In this paper, we present a robust region segmentation method based on the watershed transformation of a pseudo-distance map (PDM). A usual approach for the segmentation of a gray-scale image with the watershed algorithm is to apply it to a gradient magnitude image or the Euclidean distance map (EDM) of an edge image. However, it is well known that this approach suffers from the oversegmentation of the given image due to noisy gradients or spurious edges caused by a thresholding operation. In this paper we show thor applying the watershed algorithm to the EDM, which is a regularized version of the EDM and is directly computed form the edgestrength function (ESF) of the input image, significantly reduces the oversegmentation, and the final segmentation results obtained by a simple region-merging process are more reliable and less noisy than those of the gradient-or EDM-based methods. We also propose a simple and efficient region-merging criterion considering both boundary strengths and inner intensities of regions to be merged. The robustness of our method is proven by testing it with a variety of synthetic and real images.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.25 no.8B
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• pp.1391-1399
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• 2000

In this paper, we discussed the region-based image retrieval method using image segmentation. We proposed a segmentation method which can reduce the effect of a irregular light sources. The image segmentation method uses a region-merging, and candidate regions which are merged were selected by the energy values of high frequency bands in discrete wavelet transform. The content-based image retrieval is executed by using the segmented region information, and the images are retrieved by a color, texture, shape feature vector. The similarity measure between regions is processed by the Euclidean distance of the feature vectors. The simulation results shows that the proposed method is reasonable.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 1996.06a
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• pp.175-180
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• 1996

In this paper, a new image segmentation method based on merging of two low contrast neighbor regions iteratively is proposed. It is suitable for very low bit rate coding. The proposed method reduces efficiently contour information and preserves subjective and objective image quality. It consists of image segmentation using 4-level hierarchical structure based on mathematical morphology and 1-level region merging structure using the contrast difference of two adjacent neighbor regions. For each segmented region of the third level, two adjacent neighbor regions having low contrast difference value in fourth level based on contrast difference value is merged iteratively. It preserves image quality and shows the noticeable reduction of the contour information, so that it can improve the bottleneck problem of segmentation-based coding at very low bit rate.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.7
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• pp.105-115
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• 2011

In Vision-based Intelligent Transportation System(ITS) the segmentation of road region is a very basic functionality. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a region segmentation method using adaptive pattern extraction technique to segment road regions and sky regions from original images. The proposed method consists of three steps; firstly we perform the initial segmentation using Mean Shift algorithm, the second step is the candidate region selection based on a static-pattern matching technique and the third is the region growing step based on a dynamic-pattern matching technique. The proposed method is able to get more reliable results than the classic region segmentation methods which are based on existing split and merge strategy. The reason for the better results is because we use adaptive patterns extracted from neighboring regions of the current segmented regions to measure the region homogeneity. To evaluate advantages of the proposed method, we compared our method with the classical pattern matching method using static-patterns. In the experiments, the proposed method was proved that the better performance of 8.12% was achieved when we used adaptive patterns instead of static-patterns. We expect that the proposed method can segment road and sky areas in the various road condition in stable, and take an important role in the vision-based ITS applications.