• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.1649-1657
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• 2008

In this paper, to overcome the failure of binarization for the characters suffered from low contrast and non-uniform illumination in license plate character recognition system, we improved the binarization method by combining local thresholding with global thresholding and edge detection. Firstly, apply the local thresholding method to locate the characters in the license plate image and then get the threshold value for the character based on edge detector. This method solves the problem of local low contrast and non-uniform illumination. Finally, back-propagation Neural Network is selected as a powerful tool to perform the recognition process. The results of the experiments i1lustrate that the proposed binarization method works well and the selected classifier saves the processing time. Besides, the character recognition system performed better recognition accuracy 95.7%, and the recognition speed is controlled within 0.3 seconds.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.608-617
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• 2017

Methods of contrast enhancement have problem such as side effect of over-enhancement with non-gaussian histogram distribution, tradeoff enhancement efficiency against brightness preserving. In order to enhance contrast at various histogram distribution, segmentation to region with gaussian distribution and then enhance contrast each region. First, we segment an image into several regions using GMM(Gaussian Mixture Model)fitting by that k-mean clustering and EM(Expectation-Maximization) in $L^*a^*b^*$ color space. As a result region segmentation, we get the region map and probability map. Then we apply local contrast enhancement algorithm that mean shift to minimum overlapping of each region and preserve brightness histogram equalization. Experiment result show that proposed region based contrast enhancement method compare to the conventional method as AMBE(AbsoluteMean Brightness Error) and AE(Average Entropy), brightness is maintained and represented detail information.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.16 no.11
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• pp.1250-1260
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• 2013

The contrast enhancement techniques based on Laplacian pyramid image fusion have a benefit that they can faithfully describe the image information because they combine the multiple resource images by selecting the desired pixel in each image. However, they also have some problem that the output image may contain noise, because the methods evaluate the visual information on the basis of each pixel. In this paper, an improved contrast enhancement method, which effectively suppresses the noise, using image fusion is proposed. The proposed method combines the resource images by making Laplacian pyramids generated from weight maps, which are produced by measuring the difference between the block-based local well exposedness and local homogeneity for each resource image. We showed the proposed method could produce less noisy images compared to the conventional techniques in the test for various images.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.856-862
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• 1987

An local adaptive image segmentatin algorithm for local feature detection and effective clustering of unimodal histogram shape are proposed. Local adaptive difference image and its histogram are obtained from the input image. The parameters are derived from the histogram and used for the segmentation based on relaxatin process. The results showed effective region segmentation and good noise cleaning for the ocular fundus fluorescein angiogram which has low contrast and unimodal histogram.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers P
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• v.62 no.2
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• pp.90-94
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• 2013

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to improve the contrast ratio, to preserve information of bright regions and to maintain the color of backlight image that appears with a great relative contrast. Backlight images of the natural environment have characteristics for difference of local brightness; the overall image contrast improvement is not easy. To improve the contrast of the backlight images, MSR (Multi-Scale Retinex) algorithm using the existing multi-scale Gaussian filter is applied. However, existing multi-scale Gaussian filter involves color distortion and information loss of bright regions due to excessive contrast enhancement and noise because of the brightness improvement of dark regions. Moreover, it also increases computational complexity due to the use of multi-scale Gaussian filter. In order to solve these problems, a linear MSR is performed that reduces the amount of computation from the HSV color space preventing the color distortion and information loss due to excessive contrast enhancement. It can also remove the noise of the dark regions which is occurred due to the improved contrast through edge preserving filter. Through experimental evaluation of the average color difference comparison of CIELAB color space and the visual assessment, we have confirmed excellent performance of the proposed algorithm compared to conventional MSR algorithm.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.169-176
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• 2012

Tumor cell morphology is closely related to its migratory behaviors. An active tumor cell has a highly irregular shape, whereas a spherical cell is inactive. Thus, quantitative analysis of cell features is crucial to determine tumor malignancy or to test the efficacy of anticancer treatment. We use 3D time-lapse phase-contrast microscopy to analyze single cell morphology because it enables to observe long-term activity of living cells without photobleaching and phototoxicity, which is common in other fluorescence-labeled microscopy. Despite this advantage, there are image-level drawbacks to phase-contrast microscopy, such as local light effect and contrast interference ring. Therefore, we first corrected for non-uniform illumination artifacts and then we use intensity distribution information to detect cell boundary. In phase contrast microscopy image, cell is normally appeared as dark region surrounded by bright halo ring. Due to halo artifact is minimal around the cell body and has non-symmetric diffusion pattern, we calculate cross sectional plane which intersects center of each cell and orthogonal to first principal axis. Then, we extract dark cell region by analyzing intensity profile curve considering local bright peak as halo area. Finally, we calculated the Fourier descriptor that morphological characteristics of cell to classify tumor cells into active and inactive groups. We validated classification accuracy by comparing our findings with manually obtained results.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics S
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• v.36S no.12
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• pp.58-66
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• 1999

In this paper, an advanced histogram equalization algorithm for contrast enhancement is presented. Histogram equalization is the most popular algorithm. Global histogram equalization is simple and fast, but its contrast enhancement power is relatively low. Local histogram equalization, on the other hand, can enhance overall contrast more effectively, but the complexity of computation required is very high. In this paper, a low pass filter type mask is used to get a sub-block histogram equalization function to more simply produce the high contrast. The low pass filter type mask is realized by partially overlapped sub-block histogram equalization (POSHE). With the proposed method. the computation overhead is reduced by a factor of about one hundred compared to that of local histogram equalization while still achieving high contrast.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.748-760
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• 2012

In case brightness distribution is concentrated in a region, it is difficult to classify the image features. To solve this problem, we apply global histogram equalization and local histogram equalization to images. In case of global histogram equalization, it can be too bright or dark because it doesn't consider the density of brightness distribution. Thus, it is difficult to enhance the local contrast in the images. In case of local histogram equalization, it can produce unexpected blocks in the images. In order to enhance the contrast in the images, this paper proposes a local histogram equalization based on the Gaussian Mixture Models(GMMs) in regions of histogram. Mean and variance parameters in each regions is updated EM-algorithm repeatedly and then ranges of equalization on each regions. The experimental results performed with image of various contrasts show that the proposed algorithm is better than the global histogram equalization.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.284-294
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• 2012

A low power contrast enhancement algorithm for OLED displays is proposed in this work. The proposed algorithm increases the contrast of the image based on a linear transformation function, while reducing the power consumption of OLED displays. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm extends the global contrast enhancement to local contrast enhancement using the block-based transformation function. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm reduces the power consumption, while enhancing the contrast of an input image.

• Journal of applied mathematics & informatics
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.409-438
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• 2000

In this paper we develop a new procedure to control stepsize for Runge- Kutta methods applied to both ordinary differential equations and semi-explicit index 1 differential-algebraic equation In contrast to the standard approach, the error control mechanism presented here is based on monitoring and controlling both the local and global errors of Runge- Kutta formulas. As a result, Runge-Kutta methods with the local-global stepsize control solve differential of differential-algebraic equations with any prescribe accuracy (up to round-off errors)