• 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 Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.1481-1490
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• 2017

This paper presents an image quality enhancement algorithm for dark image acquired under poor lighting condition. Various retinex algorithms which are human perception-based image processing methods were proposed to solve this problem. Although MSR(Multi-Scale Retinex) among these algorithm works well under most lighting condition, it shows color degradation because their separate nonlinear processing of RGB color channels. To compensate for the loss of the color, MSRCR(Multi-Scale Retinex with Color Restoration) was proposed. However, it requires high computational load and has additional parameters that need to be adjusted according to input image. In order to overcome this problem, a new retinex algorithm based on MSR is proposed in this paper. The proposed method consists of V channel MSR, saturation correction, and separate contrast enhancement process. Experimental results show that the subjective and objective image quality of the proposed method better than those of the conventional methods.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.108-116
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose an image enhancement method based on Multi-Scale Retinex theory that designs Unsharp Masking Filter (UMF) and emphasizes the contrast ratio adaptively. Unsharp Masking (UM) technique emphasizes image sharpness and improves contrast ratio by adding high frequency component to the original image. The high frequency component is obtained by differentiating between original image and low frequency image. In this paper, we present how to design an UMF kernel and to adaptively apply it to increase the contrast ratio according to multi-scale retinex theory which resembles human visual system. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better quantitative performance indexes such as PSNR, ambe & SSIM and better qualitative feature like halo artifact suppression.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.233-239
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• 2016

Color enhancement basically deals with color manipulation in digital images. Recently, the technique has become widely used as a result of the increasing use of digital cameras. Retinex-based colorenhancement algorithms are a popular technique. In this paper, retinex with bilateral filtering is proposed to improve the quality of poorly illuminated images. Generally, it consists of three main steps: first, a retinex-based algorithm with color restoration; second, transformation mapping using histogram matching; and finally, smoothing the image using a bilateral filter. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully enhance image contrast while avoiding the halo effect and maintaining the color distribution in the image.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.65-73
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• 2017

This paper proposes a method to improve the image quality by designing Unsharp Mask Filter (UMF) based on Retinex theory which controls the frequency pass characteristics adaptively. Conventional unsharp masking technique uses blurring image to emphasize sharpness of image. Unsharp Masking(UM) adjusts the original image and sigma to obtain a high frequency component to be emphasized by the difference between the blurred image and the high frequency component to the original image, thereby improving the contrast ratio of the image. In this paper, we design a Unsharp Mask Filter(UMF) that can process the contrast ratio improvement method of Unsharp Masking(UM) technique with one filtering. We adaptively process the contrast ratio improvement using Unsharp Mask Filter(UMF). We propose a method based on Retinex theory for adaptive processing. For adaptive filtering, we control the weights of Unsharp Mask Filter(UMF) based on the human visual system and output more effective results.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.31-41
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• 2009

The Image sensor of digital still camera has a limited dynamic range. In high dynamic range scenes, a picture often turns out to be underexposed or overexposed. Retinex algorithm based on the theory of the human visual perception is known to be effective contrast enhancement technique. However, it happens the unbalanced contrast enhancement which is the global contrast increased, and the local contrast decreased in the high dynamic range scenes. In this paper, to enhance the both global and local contrast, we propose the weight mapping retinex algorithm. Weight map is composed of the edge and exposure data which are extracted in the each retinex image, and merged with the retinex images in the fusion processing. According to the output picture comparing and numerical analysis, the proposed algorithm gives the better output image with the increased global and local contrast.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.9-16
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• 2018

Images with lower illumination from the light source or with dark regions due to shadows, etc., can improve subjective image quality by using retinex-based image enhancement schemes. The retinex theory is a method that recognizes the relative lightness of a scene, rather than recognizing the brightness of the scene. The way the human visual system recognizes a scene in a specific position can be in one of several methods: single-scale retinex, multi-scale retinex, and multi-scale retinex with color restoration (MSRCR). The proposed method is based on the MSRCR method, which includes a color restoration step, which consists of three phases. In the first phase, the existing MSRCR method is applied. In the second phase, the dynamic range of the MSRCR output is adjusted according to its histogram. In the last phase, the proposed method transforms the retinex output value into the display dynamic range using a logarithm transformation function considering human visual system characteristics. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm effectively increases the subjective image quality, not only in dark images but also in images including both bright and dark areas. Especially in a low lightness image, the proposed algorithm showed higher performance improvement than the conventional approaches.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.32-39
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• 2011

The output image of the uncooled thermal infrared camera is difficult the identification of target because of the limited dynamic range and the various noises. Retinex algorithm based on the theory of the human visual perception is known to be effective contrast enhancement technique. However, the image quality is insufficient when it is adopted to the narrow dynamic range image as the infrared image. In this paper, we propose the revised retinex algorithm to enhance the contrast of the infrared image. To improve the contrast enhancement performance, we designed the new dynamic range compression function instead of log function. To reduce the noise and compensate the loss of edge, we added the contrast compensation procedure in the MSR image generation process. According to the output picture comparing and numerical analysis, the proposed algorithm shows the better contrast enhancement performance and the more suitable method for the infrared image enhancement.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.87-96
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• 2019

Improvement of low-light image mainly focuses on the contrast enhancement. Many researches have been carried out for brightness enhancement, contrast improvement and illumination reduction. Recently, the aforementioned approaches have been replaced by artificial neural networks. This paper proposes a methodology that can replace the Retinex-based reflectance image acquisition by deep neural network. Experiments carried out on 102 low-light images validated the feasibility of the replacement by producing PSNR=30.8682(db) and SSIM=0.4345.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.1188-1194
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• 2018

This paper proposes an image enhancement-based license plate detection algorithm to improve the overall performance of system. Non-uniform illumination conditions have huge impact on overall plate detection system accuracy. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for color image enhancement-based license plate detection for improving accuracy of images degraded by excessively strong and low sunlight. Firstly, the image is enhanced by Multi-Scale Retinex algorithm. Secondly, a plate detection method is employed to take advantage of geometric properties of connected components, which can significantly reduce the undesired plate regions. Finally, intersection over union method is applied for detecting the accurate location of number plate. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of plate detection system.