• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.728-741
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• 2015

Stereo vision has become an important technical issue in the field of 3D imaging, machine vision, robotics, image analysis, and so on. The depth map extraction from stereo video is a key technology of stereoscopic 3D video requiring stereo correspondence algorithms. This is the matching process of the similarity measure for each disparity value, followed by an aggregation and optimization step. Since it requires a lot of computational power, there are significant speed-performance advantages when exploiting parallel processing available on processors. In this situation, multi-core CPU may allow many parallel programming technologies to be realized in users computing devices. This paper proposes parallel implementations for calculating disparity map using a shared memory programming and exploiting the streaming SIMD extension technology. By doing so, we can take advantage both of the hardware and software features of multi-core processor. For the performance evaluation, we implemented a parallel SAD algorithm with OpenMP and SSE2. Their processing speeds are compared with non parallel version on stereoscopic streaming video. The experimental results show that both technologies have a significant effect on the performance and achieve great improvements on processing speed.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.4 no.5
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• pp.241-246
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• 2015

Although many different methods have been used to solve stereo correspondent problems, the deviation of accuracy is too big. Among those many methods, the one that uses segmentation information of input image has received high attention in academic field since it is very close to vision recognition. In this thesis, the existing method of acquiring a single value by using the segment information and initial disparity value was viewed in NP-hard problem to propose a new method. In order to verify the validity of the proposed method, well-known data were used for experiment and the resulted data was analyzed. Although there were some disadvantages in the time aspect, it showed somewhat useful results in the accuracy aspect.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.12B no.7 s.103
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• pp.767-774
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• 2005

In this paper, we present a snake-based scheme for tracking object contour using disparity information taken from a stereo image sequence with cluttered background. The proposed method is composed of two steps. First, 3-D motion of object is estimated and candidate snake points are selected in disparity space. Second, object contour is extracted by using a modified snake algorithm with disparity information. The proposed algorithm can successfully extract the concave contour of objects and track the object contour in complex image. Performance of the proposed algorithm has been verified by simulation.

• The Journal of Engineering Research
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.109-117
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose an object contour tracking algorithm using snakes in stereo image sequences. The proposed technique is composed of two steps. In the first step, the candidate Snake points are determined from the motion information in 3-D disparity space. In the second step, the energy of Snake function is calculated to check whether the candidate Snake points converge to the edges of the interested objects. The energy of Snake function is calculated from the candidate Snake points using the disparity information obtained by patch matching. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated by applying it to various sample images. Results prove that the proposed technique can track the edges of objects of interest in the stereo image sequences even in the cases of complicated background images or additive components.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.17B no.2
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• pp.115-124
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• 2010

Stereo matching techniques are categorized in two major schemes, local and global matching techniques. In global matching schemes, several investigations are introduced, where cost accumulation is performed in multiple matching lines. In this paper, we introduce a new multi-line stereo matching techniques which expands a conventional single-line matching scheme to multiple one. Matching cost is based on simple normalized cross correlation. We expand the scan-line optimization technique to a multi-line scan-line optimization technique. The proposed technique first generates a reliability image, which is iteratively updated based on the previous reliability measure. After some number of iterations, the reliability image is completed by a hole-filling algorithm. The hole-filling algorithm introduces a disparity score table which records the disparity score of the current pixel. The disparity of an empty pixel is determined by comparing the scores of the neighboring pixels. The proposed technique is tested using the Middlebury and CMU stereo images. The error analysis shows that the proposed matching technique yields better performance than using conventional global matching algorithm.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.2C
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• pp.130-138
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• 2006

In this paper, a new stereo image watermarking scheme based-on adaptive disparity estimation algorithm is proposed. That is, a watermark image is embedded into the right image of a stereo image pair by using the DWT and disparity information is extracted from this watermarked right image and the left image. And then, both of this extracted disparity information and the left image are transmitted to the recipient through the communication channel. At the receiver, the watermarked right image is reconstructed from the received left image and disparity information through an adaptive matching algorithm. a watermark image is finally extracted from this reconstructed right image. From some experiments using CCETT's 'Manege' and 'Friends' images as a stereo image and English alphabet '3DRC' as a watermark image, it is found that the PSNRs of the watermarked image from the reconstructed right images through the adaptive matching algorithm & DWT is improved 2.03 dB, 3.03 dB and robusted against various attacks. These experimental results also suggest a possibility of practical implementation of an adaptive matching also-rithm-based stereo imagewatermarking scheme proposed in this paper.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.229-237
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• 2002

Natural synthesis of real and virtual images is a key technology in mixed reality. For this purpose, we propose an efficient dense disparity estimation algorithm and a synthesis algorithm considering features of stereo images. Dense disparities are estimated hierarchically from the low to high resolution images. In the process, the region-dividing-bidirectional-matching algorithm makes matching process efficient and keeps the reliability of the estimated disparities, and dense disparities are assigned considering edge information. finally, mixed reality stereo images are synthesized by comparing depth data of real and virtual Images. Computer simulation shows that the proposed algorithms estimate very stable disparity vectors with sharp edge and synthesize natural stereo mixed reality images.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2005.07b
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• pp.805-807
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• 2005

본 논문에서는 동적 계획법(dynamic programming)과 이미지 세그먼트(segment)를 이용한 새로운 스테레오 정합(stereo matching)기법을 제안한다. 일반적으로 동적 계획법(dynamic programming)은 빠르면서도 비교적 정확하고, 조밀(dense)한 disparity map을 얻을 수 있다. 그러나 경계(boundary)근처의 폐색지역(occlusion region)이나, 텍스쳐가 적은 모호한 영역에서는 잘못된 결과를 유도할 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 문제점들을 해결하기 위해 먼저 이미지를 아주 작은 영역으로 분할(over-segmentation)하고, 이런 작은 영역들이 비슷한 disparity를 가질 것이라고 가정한다. 다음으로 동적 계획법(dynamic programming)을 통해 정합을 수행한다. 여기서 계산비용(cost)은 기존의 정합윈도우 안에서 세그먼트 영역을 적용한 새로운 비용함수를 사용하며, 이 새로운 비용함수를 통해 정확도를 높인다. 마지막으로 동적 계획법을 통하여 얻어진 조밀한 disparity map을 세그먼트 영역들의 시각특성(visibility)과 유사도(similarity)를 이용하여 에러를 찾아내고, 세그먼트 정합을 통해 수정함으로 정확한 disparity map을 찾아낸다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.1-8
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• 2008

The belief propagation method that has been studied recently yields good performance in disparity extraction. The method in which a target function is modeled as an energy function based on Markov random field(MRF), solves the stereo matching problem by finding the disparity to minimize the energy function. MRF models provide robust and unified framework for vision problem such as stereo and image restoration. the belief propagation method produces quite correct results, but it has difficulty in real time implementation because of higher computational complexity than other stereo methods. To relieve this problem, in this paper, we propose a fast algorithm of the belief propagation method. Energy function consists of a data term and a smoothness tern. The data term usually corresponds to the difference in brightness between correspondences, and smoothness term indicates the continuity of adjacent pixels. Smoothness information is created from messages, which are assigned using four different message arrays for the pixel positions adjacent in four directions. The processing time for four message arrays dominates 80 percent of the whole program execution time. In the proposed method, we propose an algorithm that dramatically reduces the processing time require in message calculation, since the message.; are not produced in four arrays but in a single array. Tn the last step of disparity extraction process, the messages are called in the single integrated array and this algorithm requires 1/4 computational complexity of the conventional method. Our method is evaluated by comparing the disparity error rates of our method and the conventional method. Experimental results show that the proposed method remarkably reduces the execution time while it rarely increases disparity error.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.355-361
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• 2008

Stereo matching is one of the most active research areas in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a stereo matching scheme using genetic algorithm for object depth recognition. The proposed approach considers the matching environment as an optimization problem and finds the optimal solution by using an evolutionary strategy. Accordingly, genetic operators are adapted for the circumstances of stereo matching. An individual is a disparity set. Horizontal pixel line of image is considered as a chromosome. A cost function is composed of certain constraints which are commonly used in stereo matching. Since the cost function consists of intensity, similarity and disparity smoothness, the matching process is considered at the same time in each generation. The LoG(Laplacian of Gaussian) edge is extracted and used in the determination of the chromosome. We validate our approach with experimental results on stereo images.