• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.2C
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• pp.166-174
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• 2006

In this paper, a new stereo object tracking system using the disparity motion vector is proposed. In the proposed method, the time-sequential disparity motion vector can be estimated from the disparity vectors which are extracted from the sequence of the stereo input image pair and then using these disparity motion vectors, the area where the target object is located and its location coordinate are detected from the input stereo image. Being based on this location data of the target object, the pan/tilt embedded in the stereo camera system can be controlled and as a result, stereo tracking of the target object can be possible. From some experiments with the 2 frames of the stereo image pairs having 256$\times$256 pixels, it is shown that the proposed stereo tracking system can adaptively track the target object with a low error ratio of about 3.05$\%$ on average between the detected and actual location coordinates of the target object.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.11C
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• pp.1029-1039
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• 2009

In this paper, the existing disparity aquisition algorithms were analyzed, on the bases of which a disparity generation technique that is superior in accuracy to the generation time was proposed. Basically it uses a pixel-by-pixel motion estimation technique. It has a merit of possibility of a high-speed operation. But the motion estimation technique has a disadvantage of lower accuracy because it depends on the similarity of the matching window regardless of the distribution characteristics of the texture in an image. Therefore, an enhanced technique to increase the accuracy of the disparity is required. This paper introduced a variable-sized window matching technique for this requirement. By the proposed technique, high accuracies could be obtained at the homogeneous regions and the object edges. A hardware to generate disparity image was designed, which was optimized to the processing speed so that a high throughput is possible. The hardware was designed by Verilog-HDL and synthesized using Hynix $0.35{\mu}m$ CMOS cell library. The designed hardware was operated stably at 120MHz using Cadence NC-VerilogTM and could process 15 frames per second at this clock frequency.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.8
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• pp.132-139
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• 2015

Visual SLAM(Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) has been used widely to estimate a mobile robot's location. Visual SLAM estimates relative motions with static visual features over image sequence. Because visual SLAM methods assume generally static features in the environment, we cannot obtain precise results in dynamic situation including many moving objects: cars and human beings. This paper presents a stereo vision based SLAM method in dynamic environment. First, we extract disparity map with stereo vision and compute optical flow. We then compute disparity change that is the estimated flow field between stereo views. After examining the disparity change value, we detect ROIs(Region Of Interest) in disparity space to determine dynamic scene objects. In indoor environment, many structural planes like walls may be determined as false dynamic elements. To solve this problem, we segment the scene into planar structure. More specifically, disparity values by the stereo vision are projected to X-Z plane and we employ Hough transform to determine planes. In final step, we remove ROIs nearby the walls and discriminate static scene elements in indoor environment. The experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain stable performance in dynamic environment.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.5
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• pp.56-65
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• 2009

Stereoscopic images consist of the left image and the right image. Thus, stereoscopic images have much amounts of data than single image. Then an efficient image compression technique is needed, the DPCM-based predicted coding compression technique is used in most video coding standards. Motion and disparity estimation are needed to realize the predicted coding compression technique. Their performing algorithm is block matching algorithm used in most video coding standards. Full search algorithm is a base algorithm of block matching algorithm which finds an optimal block to compare the base block with every other block in the search area. This algorithm presents the best efficiency for finding optimal blocks, but it has very large computational loads. In this paper, we have proposed fast disparity estimation algorithm using motion and disparity vector information of the prior frame in stereo image coding. We can realize fast disparity vector estimation in order to reduce search area by taking advantage of global disparity vector and to decrease computational loads by limiting search points using motion vectors and disparity vectors of prior frame. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance in the simple image sequence than complex image sequence. We conclude that the fast disparity vector estimation is possible in simple image sequences by reducing computational complexities.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.1141-1142
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• 2008

For intelligent vehicles, recognizing the sounding is an important task. In this paper we propose an road area detection system. This system uses u-disparity and v-disparity map. v-disparity map is used to find the road area. u-disparity is used to cluster the area that is an object. The test results and overall system is discribed in this paper.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07e
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• pp.1887-1890
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• 2003

This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) head pose estimation algorithm using the stereo image. Given a pair of stereo image, we automatically extract several important facial feature points using the disparity map, the gabor filter and the canny edge detector. To detect the facial feature region , we propose a region dividing method using the disparity map. On the indoor head & shoulder stereo image, a face region has a larger disparity than a background. So we separate a face region from a background by a divergence of disparity. To estimate 3D head pose, we propose a 2D-3D Error Compensated-SVD (EC-SVD) algorithm. We estimate the 3D coordinates of the facial features using the correspondence of a stereo image. We can estimate the head pose of an input image using Error Compensated-SVD (EC-SVD) method. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of estimating pose accurately.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.435-436
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• 2006

When working with multi-view images, imbalances between multi-view images occur a serious problem in multi-view video coding because they decrease the performance of disparity estimation. To overcome this problem, we propose inter-view balanced disparity estimation for multi-view video coding. In general, the imbalance problem can be solved by a preprocessing step that transforms reference images linearly. However, there are some problems in pre-processing such as the transformation of the original images. In order to obtain a balancing effect among the views, we perform block-based disparity estimation, which includes several balancing parameters.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.4C
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• pp.253-261
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose an efficient block-based disparity estimation algorithm fur multiple view image coding in EE2 and EE3 in 3DAV. The proposed method emphasizes on visual quality improvement to satisfy the requirements for multiple view generation. Therefore, we perform an adaptive disparity estimation that constructs variable blocks by considering given image features. Examining neighboring features around desired block search range is set up to decrease complexity and additional information than only using quad-tree coding through applying binary-tree and quad-tree coding by taking into account stereo image feature having big disparity. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves PSNR about 1 to 2dB compared to existing other methods and decreases computational complexity up to maximum 68 percentages than FBMA.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.6
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• pp.141-148
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• 2003

This paper proposes a new algorithm that generates the smooth and realistic transition views from one viewpoint to another on the multi-panorama based navigation system. The proposed algorithm is composed of two steps. One is prewarping that aligns the viewing directions of two panoramic images, and the other is the bidirectional disparity morphing(BDM) that generates the intermediate scene from the aligned panoramic images. For prewarping, we compute the phase correlation between two images in order to obtain the information, such as translation, rotation, and scaling. Then we align the viewing directions of two original images using these information. Afterprewarping, we compute the block based disparity vector(DV) and smooth them using two occluding patterns. As we apply these DVs to the BDM, we can generate the elaborate intermediate scene. We make an experiment on the proposed algorithm with some real panoramic images and obtain good quality intermediate scenes.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.10B no.5
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• pp.561-566
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• 2003

This paper proposes a new algorithm that generates smooth and realistic transition views from one viewpoint to another view point on the panorama based navigation system. The proposed algorithm is composed with two steps. One is prewarping that aligns the viewing direction in two panorama image, the other is bidirectional disparity morphing (BDM) that generates the intermediate scene from the aligned panorama images. For the prewarping, first of all, we compute the phase correlation between two images in order to get the information such as the displacement, rotation, and scale. Then we align the original images using these information. As soon as finishing the prewarping, we compute the block based disparity vectors (DVs) and smooth them using the two occluding patterns. As we apply these DVs to the BDM, we can get the elaborate intermediate scenes. We make an experiment on the proposed algorithm with real panoramic images and we can get the satisfactory results.