• ETRI Journal
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.415-425
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• 2019

Generative adversarial networks (GAN) have been successfully used in many image restoration tasks, including image denoising, super-resolution, and compression artifact reduction. By fully exploiting its characteristics, state-of-the-art image restoration techniques can be used to generate images with photorealistic details. However, there are many applications that require faithful rather than visually appealing image reconstruction, such as medical imaging, surveillance, and video coding. We found that previous GAN-training methods that used a loss function in the form of a weighted sum of fidelity and adversarial loss fails to reduce fidelity loss. This results in non-negligible degradation of the objective image quality, including peak signal-to-noise ratio. Our approach is to alternate between fidelity and adversarial loss in a way that the minimization of adversarial loss does not deteriorate the fidelity. Experimental results on compression-artifact reduction and super-resolution tasks show that the proposed method can perform faithful and photorealistic image restoration.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2010.06a
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• pp.242-243
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• 2010

Reducing compression artifacts such as ringing and blocking is one of important issues to improve a visual quality of a JPEG compressed image. In this paper, we propose a new post processing technique based on bilateral filtering (BF), which is one of the techniques that are used to reduce compression artifacts. An important issue with the application of the BF is the selection of the filter parameters, which affects the result significantly. In this work, we suggest a new method to select the filter parameter automatically. In addition to artifact reduction using the BF, a contrast enhancement is performed to overcome the contrast loss problem due to compression. The experimental result shows that the proposed approach can alleviate the artifacts efficiently.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• fall
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• pp.41-44
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• 2021

In this paper, we propose an efficient reference-based compression artifact reduction network for 360-degree images in an equi-rectangular projection (ERP) domain. In our insight, conventional image restoration methods cannot be applied straightforwardly to 360-degree images due to the spherical distortion. To address this problem, we propose an adaptive disparity estimator using a deformable convolution to exploit correlation among 360-degree images. With the help of the proposed convolution, the disparity estimator establishes the spatial correspondence successfully between the ERPs and extract matched textures to be used for image restoration. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides reliable high-quality textures from the reference and improves the quality of the restored image as compared to the state-of-the-art single image restoration methods.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.07b
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• pp.1007-1010
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• 2002

In this paper, we present a new blocking artifact reduction algorithm using interpolation and signal adaptive filter (SAF) based on the edge map. Generally, block-based coding, such as JPEG and MPEG, is the most popular image compression method. However, for high compression it produces noticeable blocking and ringing artifacts in the decoded image. In proposed method, all the block is classified into low and high frequency blocks in block classification procedure. And edge map is obtained by using Sobel operator on decoded image. And according to the block property we applied blocking artifacts reduction algorithm. Namely, four neighbor low frequency block is participated in interpolation based on edge map. And ringing artifacts is removed by applying a signal adaptive filter around the edge using edge map in high frequency block. The computer simulation results confirmed a better performance by the proposed method in both the subjective and objective image qualities.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.60-64
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a new post-processing technique that removes blocking and ringing artifacts in Block discrete cosine transformation (BDCT)-coded images using bilateral filtering. The selection of filter parameters is a key issue in the application of a bilateral filter because it significantly affects the result. An efficient method of selecting the bilateral filter parameters is presented. The experimental results show that the proposed approach alleviates the artifacts efficiently in terms of PSNR, MSDS, and SSIM.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.29-38
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• 2022

Although image compression is one of the essential technologies to transmit image data on a variety of surveillance and mobile healthcare applications, it causes unnecessary compression artifacts such as blocking and ringing artifacts by the lossy compression in the limited network bandwidth. Recently, image restoration methods using convolutional neural network (CNN) show the significant improvement of image quality from the compressed images. In this paper, we propose Image Denoising Convolutional Neural Networks (IDCNN) to reduce the compression artifacts for the purpose of improving the performance of object classification. In order to evaluate the classification accuracy, we used the ImageNet test dataset consisting of 50,000 natural images and measured the classification performance in terms of Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed IDCNN can improve Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy as high as 2.46% and 2.42%, respectively.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.45-55
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• 1997

In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm with adaptive thresholding for the wavelet transform (WT) based blocking artifact reduction. In the fast algorithm, all processings that are equivalent to the processing in WT domain of the first and second scale are performed in spatial domain. In the adaptive thresholding, the threshold values used to classify the block boundary are selected adaptively according to each input image by using the statistical properties of the WT of the coded signal at block boundary and at block center, which can be obtained in spatial domain. Experimental results showed that the proposed fast algorithm is about 10 times faster than the WT-based algorithm. It also was found that the postprocessing with proposed adaptive thresholding yields some PSNR improvement and better subjective quality over that with nonadaptive thresholding which has best performance at high compression ratios of a certain .image, even at low compression ratios.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.878-888
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• 2016

This paper proposes an efficient method to remove the boundary artifacts of rendered views caused by damaged depth maps in the 3D video system. First, characteristics of boundary artifacts with the compression noise in depth maps are carefully studied. Then, the artifacts suppression method is proposed by the iterative projection onto convex sets (POCS) algorithm with setting the convex set in pixel and frequency domain. The proposed method is applied to both texture and depth maps separately during view rendering. The simulation results show the boundary artifacts are greatly reduced with improving the quality of synthesized views.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.576-582
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• 2011

In this paper, we proposed the improved Advanced Detail Enhancement algorithm that improve the blurring by the lossy compression with CODEC and reduce the ringing artifacts in restoration. The conventional algorithm needs much amount of the process by the use of RGB color space. To improve this, we only used the luminance value in YCbCr color space. We verified that the performance of the improved algorithm with Y color value, the luminance value, is equal to the conventional algorithm with RGB color value and that the operation time of the improved is shorter about 24% than the conventional through the measurement of the operation time with Kodak standard images.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.49-61
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• 2014

Purpose: With the aging of the population, the attack rate of osteoporotic vertebral compression fracture is in the increasing trend, and percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) is the most commonly performed standardized treatment. Although there is a research report of the excellence of usefulness of the SPECT/CT examination in terns of the exact diagnosis before and after the procedure, the bone cement material used in the procedure influences the image quality by forming an artifact in the CT image. Therefore, the objective of the research lies on evaluating the effect the bone cement gives to a SPECT/CT image. Materials and Methods: The images were acquired by inserting a model cement to each cylinder, after setting the background (3.6 kBq/mL), hot cylinder (29.6 kBq/mL) and cold cylinder (water) to the NEMA-1994 phantom. It was reconstructed with Astonish (Iterative: 4 Subset: 16), and non attenuation correction (NAC), attenuation correction (AC+SC-) and attenuation and scatter correction (AC+SC+) were used for the CT correction method. The mean count by each correction method and the count change ratio by the existence of the cement material were compared and the contrast recovery coefficient (CRC) was obtained. Additionally, the bone/soft tissue ratio (B/S ratio) was obtained after measuring the mean count of the 4 places including the soft tissue(spine erector muscle) after dividing the vertebral body into fracture region, normal region and cement by selecting the 20 patients those have performed PVP from the 107 patients diagnosed of compression fracture. Results: The mean count by the existence of a cement material showed the rate of increase of 12.4%, 6.5%, 1.5% at the hot cylinder of the phantom by NAC, AC+SC- and AC+SC+ when cement existed, 75.2%, 85.4%, 102.9% at the cold cylinder, 13.6%, 18.2%, 9.1% at the background, 33.1%, 41.4%, 63.5% at the fracture region of the clinical image, 53.1%, 61.6%, 67.7% at the normal region and 10.0%, 4.7%, 3.6% at the soft tissue. Meanwhile, a relative count reduction could be verified at the cement adjacent part at the inside of the cylinder, and the phantom image on the lesion and the count increase ratio of the clinical image showed a contrary phase. CRC implying the contrast ratio and B/S ratio was improved in the order of NAC, AC+SC-, AC+SC+, and was constant without a big change in the cold cylinder of the phantom. AC+SC- for the quantitative count, and AC+SC+ for the contrast ratio was analyzed to be the highest. Conclusion: It is considered to be useful in a clinical diagnosis if the application of AC+SC+ that improves the contrast ratio is combined, as it increases the noise count of the soft tissue and the scatter region as well along with the effect of the bone cement in contrast to the fact that the use of AC+SC- in the spine SPECT/CT examination of a PVP performed patient drastically increases the image count and enables a high density of image of the lesion(fracture).