• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.257-263
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• 2004

This paper is related to the object-based stereo matching algorithm which makes it possible to estimate inner-region disparities for each segmented region. First, several sample points are selected for effectively representing the segmented region, Next, stereo matching is applied to the small area within segmented region which existed in the neighborhood or each sample point. Finally, inner-region disparities are interpolated using a plane equation with disparity of each selected sample. According to the proposed method, the problem of feature-based method that the depth estimation is possible only in the feature points can be solved through the propagation of the disparity in the sample point into the inside of the region. Also, as selecting sample points in contour of segmented region we can effectively suppress obscurity which is occurred in the depth estimation of the monotone region in area-based methods.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.24 no.12B
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• pp.2438-2446
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• 1999

Most of block based stereo pair compression schemes utilize the constant block size and searching area size for all the stereo pairs to find the best matching block. However, it is not efficient to use the same block size and size of searching area to all the stereo pairs, since each stereo pair has different disparity. In this Paper, we propose a method to calculate the total disparity of stereo pairs, and show how to determine the size of the block and searching area which are applied for the block based compression of the stereo pairs.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.9 no.11
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• pp.899-905
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• 2003

An intermediate images generation method using multi-resolution based hierarchical block matching disparity map is proposed. This method is composed of a disparity estimation, an occlusion detection and intermediate image synthesis. For the disparity estimation, which is one of the important processes in intermediate image synthesis, we use the multi-resolution based hierarchical block matching algorithm to overcome the imperfect ness of block matching algorithm. The proposed method makes disparity maps more accurate and dense by multi-resolution based hierarchical block matching, and the estimated disparity maps are used to generate intermediate images of stereo images. Generated intermediate images show 0.1∼1.4 ㏈ higher PSNR than the images obtained by block matching algorithm.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.10 no.4 s.29
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• pp.576-586
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• 2005

This paper presents a new estimation and representation of a disparity map for stereo-based video communication systems. Several pixel-based and block-based algorithms have been proposed to estimate the disparity map. While the pixel-based algorithms can achieve high accuracy in computing the disparity map, they require a lost of bits to represent the disparity information. The bit rate can be reduced by the block-based algorithm, sacrificing the representation accuracy. In this paper, the block enclosing a distinct edge is divided into two regions and the disparity of each region is set to that of a neighboring block. The proposed algorithm employs accumulated histograms and a neural network to classify a type of a block. In this paper, we proved that the proposed algorithm is more effective than the conventional algorithms in estimating and representing disparity maps through several experiments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2009.01a
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• pp.99-102
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• 2009

In this paper a hierarchical stereo matching algorithm based on feature extraction is proposed. The boundary (edge) as feature point in an image is first obtained by segmenting an image into red, green, blue and white regions. With the obtained boundary information, disparities are extracted by matching window on the image boundary, and the initial disparity map is generated when assigned the same disparity to neighbor pixels. The final disparity map is created with the initial disparity. The regions with the same initial disparity are classified into the regions with the same color and we search the disparity again in each region with the same color by changing block size and search range. The experiment results are evaluated on the Middlebury data set and it show that the proposed algorithm performed better than a phase based algorithm in the sense that only about 14% of the disparities for the entire image are inaccurate in the final disparity map. Furthermore, it was verified that the boundary of each region with the same disparity was clearly distinguished.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.99-111
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• 2010

This paper proposes an efficient hardware architecture to estimate disparities between 2D images for generating 3D depth images in a stereo vision system. Stereo matching methods are classified into global and local methods. The local matching method uses the cost functions based on pixel windows such as SAD(sum of absolute difference), SSD(sum of squared difference) and NCC(normalized cross correlation). The NCC-based cost function is less susceptible to differences in noise and lighting condition between left and right images than the subtraction-based functions such as SAD and SSD, and for this reason, the NCC is preferred to the other functions. However, software-based implementations are not adequate for the NCC-based real-time stereo matching, due to its numerous complex operations. Therefore, we propose a fast pipelined hardware architecture suitable for real-time operations of the NCC function. By adopting a block-based box-filtering scheme to perform NCC operations in parallel, the proposed architecture improves processing speed compared with the previous researches. In this architecture, it takes almost the same number of cycles to process all the pixels, irrespective of the window size. Also, the simulation results show that its disparity estimation has low error rate.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07e
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• pp.2295-2298
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• 2003

The correspondence problem for stereo image matching plays an important role in expanding view points as multi view video applications become more popular. The conventional disparity estimation algorithms have limitation to find exact disparities because they consider not image features but similiar intensity points. Thus we propose an efficient disparity estimation algorithm considering features of stereo image pairs. As simulation results, our proposed method confirms better intermediate views than the existing block-matching methods.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.902-915
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• 2011

Recently in the area-based stereo matching field, Adaptive Support-Weight (ASW) method that weights matching cost adaptively according to the luminance intensity and the geometric difference shows promising matching performance. However, ASW requires more computational cost than other matching algorithms do and its real-time implementation becomes impractical. By applying Integral Histogram technique after approximating to the Bilateral filter equation, the computational time of ASW can be restricted in constant time regardless of the support window size. However, Integral Histogram technique causes loss of the matching accuracy during approximation process of the original ASW equation. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that maintains the ASW algorithm's matching accuracy while reducing the computational costs. In the proposed algorithm, we propose Sub-Block method that groups the pixels within the support area. We also propose the method adjusting the disparity search range depending on edge information. The proposed technique reduces the calculation time efficiently while improving the matching accuracy.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.3C
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• pp.279-287
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• 2009

In this paper, a hierarchical stereo matching with color information is proposed. To generate an initial disparity map, feature based stereo matching is carried out and to generate a final disparity map, hierarchical stereo matching is carried out. The boundary (edge) region is obtained by segmenting a given image into R, G, B and White components. From the obtained boundary, disparity is extracted. The initial disparity map is generated when the extracted disparity is spread to the surrounding regions by evaluating autocorrelation from each color region. The initial disparity map is used as an initial value for generating the final disparity map. The final disparity map is generated from each color region by changing the size of a block and the search range. 4 test images that are provided by Middlebury stereo vision are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm objectively. The experiment results show better performance compared to the Graph-cuts and Dynamic Programming methods. In the final disparity map, about 11% of the disparities for the entire image were inaccurate. It was verified that the boundary for the non-contiguous point was clear in the disparity map.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.8 no.10
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• pp.874-880
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• 2002

A number of techniques have been proposed for 3D display using view-difference of two eyes. These methods do not express enough reality like real world. The display images have to change according to the position of a viewer to improve reality. In this paper, we present an approach for generating intermediate image between two different view images by applying new image interpolation algorithm The interpolation algorithm is designed to cope with complex shapes. The proposed image interpolation algorithm generates rotated image about vertical axes by any angle from base images. Each base image that was obtained from CCD camera has an view-angle difference of $3^{\circ}C$, $5.5^{\circ}C$, $^{\circ}C$, $22^{\circ}C$, and $45^{\circ}C$. The proposed into mediate image generation method uses the geometric analysis of image and depth information through the block-based matching method.