• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.544-564
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• 2022

Underwater images often suffer from color distortion, blurring and low contrast, which is caused by the propagation of light in the underwater environment being affected by the two processes: absorption and scattering. To cope with the poor quality of underwater images, this paper proposes a multiscale fusion underwater image enhancement method based on channel attention mechanism and local binary pattern (LBP). The network consists of three modules: feature aggregation, image reconstruction and LBP enhancement. The feature aggregation module aggregates feature information at different scales of the image, and the image reconstruction module restores the output features to high-quality underwater images. The network also introduces channel attention mechanism to make the network pay more attention to the channels containing important information. The detail information is protected by real-time superposition with feature information. Experimental results demonstrate that the method in this paper produces results with correct colors and complete details, and outperforms existing methods in quantitative metrics.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.4E
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• pp.125-133
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a critical banded wavelet packet-based spectral subtraction for speech enhancement. Critical banded wavelet packet, which reflects the human auditory system, may lead to minimization of intelligibility loss and quality improvement of the enhanced speech in the spectral domain, when combined with an appropriate spectral subtraction gain function. The proposed method shows better performance than the conventional one in comparative assessments. We also show that, for effective evaluation of enhanced speech, it is essential to consider the characteristics of speech quality measures.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.57-60
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a new excitation enhancement technique to improve the speech quality of low bit rate speech coders. The proposed technique is based on a harmonic model and it is employed only in the decoding process of speech coders without any additional bits. We develop the procedure of harmonic model parameters estimation and harmonic generation. and apply the technique to a current state of the art low bit rate speech coder, ITU-T G.729 Annex D. Also its performance is measured by using the ITU-T P.862 PESQ score and compared to those of the phase dispersion filter and the long-term postfilter applied to the decoded excitation. It is shown that the proposed excitation enhancement technique can improve the quality of decoded speech and provide better quality for male speech than other techniques.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.23-30
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• 2010

This paper presents a histogram equalization based on the nonlinear transformation function for enhancing the quality of medical images. The nonlinear transformation function is applied to adaptively equalize the brightness of the image according to its intensity level frequency. The logistic function is used as a nonlinear transformation function, which is calculated by only using the intensity level with maximum frequency and the maximum intensity level in an histogram, and the total number of pixels. The proposed method has been applied for equalizing 8 medical images with a different resolution and histogram distribution. The experimental results show that the proposed method has the superior enhancement performances compared with the conventional histogram equalization. And the proposed histogram equalization can be used in various multimedia systems in real-time.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.370-376
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• 2023

Aiming at the problems of low image enhancement accuracy, long enhancement time and poor image quality in the traditional robot sequence motion image enhancement methods, an adaptive enhancement method for robot sequence motion image is proposed. The feature representation of the image was obtained by Karhunen-Loeve (K-L) transformation, and the nonlinear relationship between the robot joint angle and the image feature was established. The trajectory planning was carried out in the robot joint space to generate the robot sequence motion image, and an adaptive homomorphic filter was constructed to process the noise of the robot sequence motion image. According to the noise processing results, the brightness of robot sequence motion image was enhanced by using the multi-scale Retinex algorithm. The simulation results showed that the proposed method had higher accuracy and consumed shorter time for enhancement of robot sequence motion images. The simulation results showed that the image enhancement accuracy of the proposed method could reach 100%. The proposed method has important research significance and economic value in intelligent monitoring, automatic driving, and military fields.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.420-429
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• 2019

Recently, researches using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based approaches have been actively conducted to improve the reduced quality of compressed video using block-based video coding standards such as H.265/HEVC. This paper aims to summarize and analyze the network models in these quality enhancement studies. At first the detailed components of CNN for quality enhancement are overviewed and then we summarize prior studies in the image domain. Next, related studies are summarized in three aspects of network structure, dataset, and training methods, and present representative models implementation and experimental results for performance comparison.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.32-40
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• 2022

Underwater optical images face various limitations that degrade the image quality compared with optical images taken in our atmosphere. Attenuation according to the wavelength of light and reflection by very small floating objects cause low contrast, blurry clarity, and color degradation in underwater images. We constructed an image data of the Korean sea and enhanced it by learning the characteristics of underwater images using the deep learning techniques of CycleGAN (cycle-consistent adversarial network), UGAN (underwater GAN), FUnIE-GAN (fast underwater image enhancement GAN). In addition, the underwater optical image was enhanced using the image processing technique of Image Fusion. For a quantitative performance comparison, UIQM (underwater image quality measure), which evaluates the performance of the enhancement in terms of colorfulness, sharpness, and contrast, and UCIQE (underwater color image quality evaluation), which evaluates the performance in terms of chroma, luminance, and saturation were calculated. For 100 underwater images taken in Korean seas, the average UIQMs of CycleGAN, UGAN, and FUnIE-GAN were 3.91, 3.42, and 2.66, respectively, and the average UCIQEs were measured to be 29.9, 26.77, and 22.88, respectively. The average UIQM and UCIQE of Image Fusion were 3.63 and 23.59, respectively. CycleGAN and UGAN qualitatively and quantitatively improved the image quality in various underwater environments, and FUnIE-GAN had performance differences depending on the underwater environment. Image Fusion showed good performance in terms of color correction and sharpness enhancement. It is expected that this method can be used for monitoring underwater works and the autonomous operation of unmanned vehicles by improving the visibility of underwater situations more accurately.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.663-671
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• 1988

In this paper, in order to reduce the blocking effect of block coded images, we propose the method considering the lowpass and bandpass components of Granrath's human visual model. This method consists of two-stage enhancement procedure. The first step is lowpass filtering which smooths out the blocking effect, and the second step is a high frequency enhancement procedure to increase the contrast decreased by the lowpass filtering in the first step. In the first step, the one-dimensional Gaussian filter which aligthns parallel to the edge direction is considered to preserve the edge in the block and the two-dimensional Gaussian filter is used to smooth out the blocking effect near the block boundaries. In the second step, the lowpass and bandpass components of the Granrath's model are considered to increase contrast in a restored image. The performance comparison of the proposed method and the existing mehtods is made by a computer simulation with several block coded images. We can see that the enhancement in the subjective quality of images of the proposed method is more significant than the enhancement in the subjective quality of images of the proposed method is more significant than the existing methods, though the proposed method does not show better performance on the PSNR gain, the poor measure of picture quality for block coded images.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1233-1243
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• 2015

The contrast enhancement is great challenge in the image processing when images are suffering from poor contrast problem. Therefore, in order to overcome this problem an automatic method is proposed for contrast enhancement of natural color images. The proposed method consist of two stages: in first stage lightness component in YIQ color space is normalized by sigmoid function after the adaptive histogram equalization is applied on Y component and in second stage automatic color contrast enhancement algorithm is applied on output of the first stage. The proposed algorithm is tested on different NASA color images, hyperspectral color images and other types of natural color images. The performance of proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms in terms of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor. The higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor imply that the visual quality of the enhanced image is good. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed algorithm provides higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor as compared to other existing contrast enhancement algorithms. The proposed algorithm also provides better visual enhancement results as compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.163-177
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• 2024

The fingerprint image quality relies on the clearness of separated ridges by valleys and the uniformity of the separation. The condition of skin still dominate the overall quality of the fingerprint. However, the identification performance of such system is very sensitive to the quality of the captured fingerprint image. Fingerprint image quality analysis and enhancement are useful in improving the performance of fingerprint identification systems. A fuzzy technique is introduced in this paper for both fingerprint image quality analysis and enhancement. First, the quality analysis is performed by extracting four features from a fingerprint image which are the local clarity score (LCS), global clarity score (GCS), ridge_valley thickness ratio (RVTR), and the Global Contrast Factor (GCF). A fuzzy logic technique that uses Mamdani fuzzy rule model is designed. The fuzzy inference system is able to analyse and determinate the fingerprint image type (oily, dry or neutral) based on the extracted feature values and the fuzzy inference rules. The percentages of the test fuzzy inference system for each type is as follow: For dry fingerprint the percentage is 81.33, for oily the percentage is 54.75, and for neutral the percentage is 68.48. Secondly, a fuzzy morphology is applied to enhance the dry and oily fingerprint images. The fuzzy morphology method improves the quality of a fingerprint image, thus improving the performance of the fingerprint identification system significantly. All experimental work which was done for both quality analysis and image enhancement was done using the DB_ITS_2009 database which is a private database collected by the department of electrical engineering, institute of technology Sepuluh Nopember Surabaya, Indonesia. The performance evaluation was done using the Feature Similarity index (FSIM). Where the FSIM is an image quality assessment (IQA) metric, which uses computational models to measure the image quality consistently with subjective evaluations. The new proposed system outperformed the classical system by 900% for the dry fingerprint images and 14% for the oily fingerprint images.