• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.267-275
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• 2019

Currently, due to the widespread use of a smartphone, QR codes allow users to access a variety of added services. However, the QR codes posted on curved surfaces tend to be non-uniformly illuminated and bring about the decline of recognition rate. So, in this paper, the block-adaptive binarization policy is adopted to find an optimal threshold appropriate for bimodal image like QR codes. For a large block, its histogram distribution is found to get an initial threshold and then the block is partitioned to reflect the local characteristics of small blocks. Also, morphological operation is applied to their neighboring boundary at the discontinuous at the QR code junction. This paper proposes an authentication method based on the color code, uniquely painted within QR code. Through a variety of practical experiments, it is shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional method in detecting QR code and also maintains good recognition rate up to 40 degrees on curved surfaces.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.12C
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• pp.1173-1183
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for improving visual quality of AR-FGS (Adaptive Reference FGS) which is adopted as a key scheme for SVC (Scalable Video Coding) or H.264 scalable extension. The standard FGS (Fine Granularity Scalability) adopts AR-FGS that introduces temporal prediction into FGS layer by using a high quality reference signal which is constructed by the weighted average between the base layer reconstructed imageand enhancement reference to improve the coding efficiency in the FGS layer. However, when the enhancement stream is truncated at certain bitstream position in transmission, the rest of the data of the FGS layer will not be available at the FGS decoder. Thus the most noticeable problem of using the enhancement layer in prediction is the degraded visual quality caused by drifting because of the mismatch between the reference frame used by the FGS encoder and that by the decoder. To solve this problem, we exploit the principle of cyclical block coding that is used to encode quantized transform coefficients in a cyclical manner in the FGS layer. Encoding block coefficients in a cyclical manner places 'higher-value' bits earlier in the bitstream. The quantized transform coefficients included in the ealry coding cycle of cyclical block coding have higher probability to be correctly received and decoded than the others included in the later cycle of the cyclical block coding. Therefore, we can minimize visual quality degradation caused by bitstream truncation by adjusting weighting factor to control the contribution of the bitstream produced in each coding cycle of cyclical block coding when constructing the enhancement layer reference frame. It is shown by simulations that the improved AR-FGS scheme outperforms the standard AR-FGS by about 1 dB in maximum in the reconstructed visual quality.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.24 no.8B
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• pp.1518-1531
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• 1999

The reconstructed images from highly compressed MPEG or H.263 data have noticeable image degradations, such as blocking artifacts near the block boundaries, corner outliers at cross points of blocks, and ringing noise near image edges, because the MPEG or H.263 quantizes the transformed coefficients of 8$\times$8 pixel blocks. A post-processing algorithm has been proposed by authors to reduce quantization effects, such as blocking artifacts, corner outliers, and ringing noise, in MPEG-decompressed images. Our signal-adaptive post-processing algorithm reduces the quantization effects adaptively by using both spatial frequency and temporal information extracted from the compressed data. The blocking artifacts are reduced by one-dimensional (1-D) horizontal and vertical low pass filtering (LPF), and the ringing noise is reduced by two-dimensional (2-D) signal-adaptive filtering (SAF). A comparison study of the subjective quality evaluation using modified single stimulus method (MSSM), the objective quality evaluation (PSNR) and the computation complexity analysis between the signal-adaptive post-processing algorithm and the MPEG-4 VM (Verification Model) post-processing algorithm is performed by computer simulation with several MPEG-4 image sequences. According to the comparison study, the subjective image qualities of both algorithms are similar, whereas the PSNR and the comparison complexity analysis of the signal-adaptive post-processing algorithm shows better performance than the VM post-processing algorithm.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.149-158
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• 2005

This paper proposed a blind watermarking method for video contents which satisfies both the invisibility and the robustness to attacks to prohibit counterfeiting, modification, illegal usage and illegal re-production of video contents. This watermarking algorithm targets MPEG compression system and was designed to control the amount of watermarking to be inserted according to the adaptive quantization scale code to follow the adaptive quantization of the compression system. The inserting positions of the watermark were chosen by considering the frequency property of an image and horizontal, vertical and diagonal property of a $8{\times}8$ image block. Also the amount of watermarking for each watermark bit was decided by considering the quantization step. This algorithm was implemented by C++ and experimented for invisibility and robustness with MPEG-2 system. The experiment results showed that the method satisfied enough the invisibility of the inserted watermark and robustness against attacks. For the general attacks, the error rate of the extracted watermark was less than $10\%$, which is enough in robustness against the attacks. Therefore, this algorithm is expected to be used effectively as a part in many MPEG systems for real-time watermarking, especially in the sensitive applications to the network environments.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.41 no.9
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• pp.728-743
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• 2014

Finger printing and sequence alignment are well-known approaches for document similarity comparison. A fingerprinting method is simple and fast, but it can not find particular similar regions. A string alignment method is used for identifying regions of similarity by arranging the sequences of a string. It has an advantage of finding particular similar regions, but it also has a disadvantage of taking more computing time. The Multi-Level Alignment (MLA) is a new method designed for taking the advantages of both methods. The MLA divides input documents into uniform length blocks, and then extracts fingerprints from each block and calculates similarity of block pairs by comparing the fingerprints. A similarity table is created in this process. Finally, sequence alignment is used for specifying longest similar regions in the similarity table. The MLA allows users to change block's size to control proportion of the fingerprint algorithm and the sequence alignment. As a document is divided into several blocks, similar regions are also fragmented into two or more blocks. To solve this fragmentation problem, we proposed a united block method. Experimentally, we show that computing document's similarity with the united block is more accurate than the original MLA method, with minor time loss.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.402-410
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• 2006

This paper presents a method for feature based block motion estimation that uses multi -resolution image sequences to obtain the panoramic images in the continuous ultrasound image sequences. In the conventional block motion estimation method, the centers of motion estimation blocks are set at the predetermined and equally spaced locations. This requires the large blocks to include at least one feature, which inevitably requires long estimation time. In this paper, we propose an adaptive method which locates the center of the motion estimation blocks at the feature points. This make it possible to reduce the block size while keeping the motion estimation accuracy The Harris-Stephen corner detector is used to get the feature points. The comer points tend to group together, which cause the error in the global motion estimation. In order to distribute the feature points as evenly as Possible, the image is firstly divided into regular subregions, and a strongest corner point is selected as a feature in each subregion. The ultrasound Images contain speckle patterns and noise. In order to reduce the noise artifact and reduce the computational time, the proposed method use the multi-resolution image sequences. The first algorithm estimates the motion in the smoothed low resolution image, and the estimated motion is prolongated to the next higher resolution image. By this way the size of search region can be reduced in the higher resolution image. Experiments were performed on three types of ultrasound image sequences. These were shown that the proposed method reduces both the computational time (from 77ms to 44ms) and the displaced frame difference (from 66.02 to 58.08).

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.55-63
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• 2000

This paper investigated the sub-region compression effect of the three dimensional DCT(3D-DCT) using the difference component(DC) of inter-frame in images. The proposed algorithm are the method that obtain compression effect to divide the information into subband after 3D-DCT, the data appear the type of cubic block(8${\times}$8${\times}$8) in eight difference components per unit. In the frequence domain that transform the eight differential component frames into eight DCT frames with components of both spatial and temporal frequencies of inter-frame, the image data are divided into frame component(8${\times}$8 block) of time-axis direction into 4${\times}$4 sub block in order to effectively obtain compression data because image components are concentrate in corner region with low-frequency of cubic block. Here, using the weight of sub block, we progressed compression ratio as consider to adaptive sub-region of low frequency part. In simulation, we estimated compression ratio, reconstructed image resolution(PSNR) with the simpler image and the complex image contained the higher frequency component. In the result, we could obtain the high compression effect of 30.36dB(average value in the complex-image) and 34.75dB(average value in the simple-image) in compression range of 0.04~0.05bpp.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.209-220
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• 2004

The main feature of H.264 standard against conventional video standards is the high coding efficiency and the network friendliness. In spite of these outstanding features, it is not easy to implement H.264 codec as a real-time system due to its high requirement of memory bandwidth and intensive computation. Although the variable block size motion compensation using multiple reference frames is one of the key coding tools to bring about its main performance gain, it demands substantial computational complexity due to SAD (Sum of Absolute Difference) calculation among all possible combinations of coding modes to find the best motion vector. For speedup of motion estimation process, therefore, this paper proposes fast algorithms for both integer-pel and fractional-pel motion search. Since many conventional fast integer-pel motion estimation algorithms are not suitable for H.264 having variable motion block sizes, we propose the motion field adaptive search using the hierarchical block structure based on the diamond search applicable to variable motion block sizes. Besides, we also propose fast fractional-pel motion search using small diamond search centered by predictive motion vector based on statistical characteristic of motion vector.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.3E
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• pp.97-103
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• 2007

We propose a combined STBC (Space Time Block Coding) and AMC (Adaptive Modulation and Coding) in the underwater multipath communication channel. Performance of UAC (underwater acoustic communication) in shallow water is degraded by complicated multipath and reverberation. For this reason, and considering the variability of the ocean channel, we combined STBC and AMC techniques, which are the spatial diversity in a multi-sensor communication system. BER (Bit error rate) of combined STBC and AMC is improved by 5dB when we compare with the BER of a single sensor based system. The proposed system shows a 3dB improvement when we compare it with the BER of the single sensor based system applying the AMC technique only.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.200-208
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• 2016

Compressed sensing is a signal processing technique for efficiently acquiring and reconstructing in an under-sampled (i.e., under Nyquist rate) representation. A block compressed sensing with projected Landweber (BCS-SPL) framework is most widely known, but, it has high computational complexity at decoder side. In this paper, by introducing adaptive exit criteria instead of fixed exit criteria to SPL framework, an effective fast algorithm is designed in such a way that it can utilize efficiently the sparsity property in DCT coefficients during the iterative thresholding process. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm results in the significant reduction of the decoding time, while providing better visual qualities than conventional algorithm.