• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.432-440
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• 2008

In this paper, a user-friendly mobile photo album system and albuming functions to support it are introduced. Stand-alone implementation in a mobile device is considered. The main idea of user-friendly photo browsing for albuming functions is to enable users to organize and browse their photos along semantically meaningful axes of events, personal identities, and categories. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method would be sufficiently useful and efficient for browsing personal photos in mobile environment.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.45-52
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• 2014

This paper proposes an efficient photo retrieval system that automatically indexes for searching of relevant images, using a combination of geo-coded information, direction/location of image capture device and content-based visual features. A photo image is labeled with its GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates and direction of the camera view at the moment of capture, and the label leads to generate a geo-spatial index with three core elements of latitude, longitude and viewing direction. Then, content-based visual features are extracted and combined with the geo-spatial information, for indexing and retrieving the photo images. For user's querying process, the proposed method adopts two steps as a progressive approach, filtering the relevant subset prior to use a content-based ranking function. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, we assess the simulation performance in terms of average precision and F-score, using a natural photo collection. Comparing the proposed approach to retrieve using only visual features, an improvement of 20.8% was observed. The experimental results show that the proposed method exhibited a significant enhancement of around 7.2% in retrieval effectiveness, compared to previous work. These results reveal that a combination of context and content analysis is markedly more efficient and meaningful that using only visual feature for image search.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.442-446
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• 2010

In this paper we propose an indexing method supporting the browsing scheme for effective image search on large photo database. The proposed method is based on M-tree, a representative indexing scheme on matrix space. While M-tree focuses on the searching efficiency by pruning, it did not consider browsing efficiency directly. This paper proposes node selection method, node splitting method and node splitting conditions for browsing efficiency. According to test results, node cohesion and clustering precision improved 1.5 and twice the original respectively and searching speed also increased twice the original speed.

• Journal of Information Management
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.50-70
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• 2000

Since the contents of internet resources are beginning to include texts, images and sounds, different Web-based image search engines have been developed accordingly. It is a fact that these diversities of multimedia contents have made search process and retrieval of relevant information very difficult. The purpose of the study is to compare and evaluate its special features and performance of the existing image search engines in order to provide user help to select appropriate search engines. The study selected AV Photo Finder, Lycos MultiMedia, Amazing Picture Machine, Image Surfer, WebSeek, Ditto for comparison and evaluation because of their reputations of popularity among users of image search engines. The methodology of the study was to analyze previous related literature and establish criteria for the evaluation of image search engines. The study investigated characteristics, indexing methods, search capabilities, screen display and user interfaces of different search engines for the purpose of comparison of its performance. Finally, the study measured relative recall and precision ratios to evaluate their electiveness of retrieval under the experimental set up. Results of the comparative analysis in regard to its search performance are as follows. AV Photo Finder marked the highest rank among other image search engines. Ditto and WebSeek also showed comparatively high precision ratio. Lycos MultiMedia and Image Surfer follows after them. Amazing Picture Machine stowed the lowest in ranking.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.9 no.9
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• pp.1139-1149
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• 2006

This paper describes a novel and efficient algorithm, which extracts focused objects from still images with low depth-of-field (DOF). The algorithm unfolds into four modules. In the first module, a HOS map, in which the spatial distribution of the high-frequency components is represented, is obtained from an input low DOF image [1]. The second module finds OOI candidate by using characteristics of the HOS. Since it is possible to contain some holes in the region, the third module detects and fills them. In order to obtain an OOI, the last module gets rid of background pixels in the OOI candidate. The experimental results show that the proposed method is highly useful in various applications, such as image indexing for content-based retrieval from huge amounts of image database, image analysis for digital cameras, and video analysis for virtual reality, immersive video system, photo-realistic video scene generation and video indexing system.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.11 no.1 s.30
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• pp.15-27
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• 2006

In this paper, a novel approach is addressed to facilitate the browsing of large collection of digital photos associated with specified person(s) in the photos. The goal of the proposed method is to exploit additional person-identity features as incorporating facial regions and peripheral clothes region associated with them. For more effective incorporation of the clothes and facial features, situation-based photo clustering is also proposed. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed method experiment was performed with 1120 generic home photos. The experiment results showed that the proposed method outperformed the conventional method us El.g only face feature as showing the average performance of about 92% contrary to the average performance of about 70% in the conventional method.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.13B no.4 s.107
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• pp.417-420
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• 2006

Detection of faces on still color images with arbitrary backgrounds is attempted in this paper. The newly proposed method is invariant to arbitrary background, number of faces, scale, orientation, skin color, and illumination through the steps of color clustering, cluster scanning, sub-block processing, face area detection, and face verification. The sub-block method makes the proposed method invariant to the size and the number of faces in the image. The proposed method does not need any pre-training steps or a preliminary face database. The proposed method may be applied to areas such as security control, video and photo indexing, and other automatic computer vision-related fields.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.10
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• pp.851-861
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• 2006

The paper proposes a novel unsupervised video object segmentation algorithm for image sequences with low depth-of-field (DOF), which is a popular photographic technique enabling to represent the intention of photographer by giving a clear focus only on an object-of-interest (OOI). The proposed algorithm largely consists of two modules. The first module automatically extracts OOIs from the first frame by separating sharply focused OOIs from other out-of-focused foreground or background objects. The second module tracks OOIs for the rest of the video sequence, aimed at running the system in real-time, or at least, semi-real-time. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm provides an effective tool, which can be a basis of applications, such as video analysis for virtual reality, immersive video system, photo-realistic video scene generation and video indexing systems.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.66-77
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• 2011

We propose a framework for grouping photographic advertising images that employs a hierarchical indexing scheme based on efficient feature combinations. The study provides one specific application of effective tools for monitoring photographic advertising information through online and offline channels. Specifically, it develops a preprocessor for advertising image information tracking. We consider both global features that contain general information on the overall image and local features that are based on local image characteristics. The developed local features are invariant under image rotation and scale, the addition of noise, and change in illumination. Thus, they successfully achieve reliable matching between different views of a scene across affine transformations and exhibit high accuracy in the search for matched pairs of identical images. The method works with global features in advance to organize coarse clusters that consist of several image groups among the image data and then executes fine matching with local features within each cluster to construct elaborate clusters that are separated by identical image groups. In order to decrease the computational time, we apply a conventional clustering method to group images together that are similar in their global characteristics in order to overcome the drawback of excessive time for fine matching time by using local features between identical images.