• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.865-871
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• 2022

In this paper, we propose a method of extracting prostate region using morphological characteristics of ultra-sonic image of prostate. In the first step of the proposed method, the edge area of the prostate image is extracted. The histogram of ultra-sonic image is used to extract base objects to detect the upper edge of prostate region by altering the contrast of the image, then, the lower edges of the extracted base objects are connected by using monotone cubic spline interpolation to extract the upper edge. Step 2, Otsu's binarization is applied to the region under the extracted upper edge of the prostate ultra-sonic image to extract the lower edge of prostate. In the last step, the upper and the lower edges are connected to extract prostate region and by comparing the extracted region of prostate with the one measured manually, the result showed that the morphological characteristics of prostate in ultrasonic image can be utilized to extract the prostate region.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.61-71
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• 2009

Vehicle license plate is the only way to check the registrated information of a vehicle. Many works have been devoted to the vision system of recognizing the license plate, which has been widely used to control an illegal parking. However, it is difficult to correctly segment characters on the license plate since an illumination is affected by a weather change and a neighboring obstacles. This paper proposes a robust method of segmenting the character of the license plate on irregular illumination condition. The proposed method enhance the contrast of license plate images using the Chi-Square probability density function. For segmenting characters on the license plate, binary images with the high quality are gained by applying the adaptive threshold. Preprocessing and labeling algorithm are used to eliminate noises existing during the whole segmentation process. Finally, profiling method is applied to segment characters on license plate from binary images.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.11-22
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• 2017

This study proposes IMToon(IMage-based carToon) which is an image-based cartoon authoring system using an image processing algorithm. The proposed IMToon allows general users to easily and efficiently produce frames comprising cartoons based on image. The authoring system is designed largely with two functions: cartoon effector and interactive story editor. Cartoon effector automatically converts input images into a cartoon-style image, which consists of image-based cartoon shading and outline drawing steps. Image-based cartoon shading is to receive images of the desired scenes from users, separate brightness information from the color model of the input images, simplify them to a shading range of desired steps, and recreate them as cartoon-style images. Then, the final cartoon style images are created through the outline drawing step in which the outlines of the shaded images are applied through edge detection. Interactive story editor is used to enter text balloons and subtitles in a dialog structure to create one scene of the completed cartoon that delivers a story such as web-toon or comic book. In addition, the cartoon effector, which converts images into cartoon style, is expanded to videos so that it can be applied to videos as well as still images. Finally, various experiments are conducted to verify the possibility of easy and efficient production of cartoons that users want based on images with the proposed IMToon system.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.723-730
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• 2010

Recently, diverse 3D image processing technologies have been applied in industries. Among them, stereoscopic conversion is a technology to generate a stereoscopic image from a conventional 2D image. The technology can be applied to movie and broadcasting contents and the viewer can watch 3D stereoscopic contents. Further the stereoscopic conversion is required to be applied to other fields. Following such trend, the aim of this paper is to apply the stereoscopic conversion to medical fields. The medical images can deliver more detailed 3D information with a stereoscopic image compared with a 2D plane image. This paper presents a novel methodology for converting a 2D medical image into a 3D stereoscopic image. For this, mean shift segmentation, edge detection, intensity analysis, etc are utilized to generate a final depth map. From an image and the depth map, left and right images are constructed. In the experiment, the proposed method is performed on a medical image such as CT (Computed Tomograpy). The stereoscopic image displayed on a 3D monitor shows a satisfactory performance.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.96-110
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• 2017

Most of vehicle detection studies using the existing general lens or wide-angle lens have a blind spot in the rear detection situation, the image is vulnerable to noise and a variety of external environments. In this paper, we propose a method that is detection in harsh external environment with noise, blind spots, etc. First, using a fish-eye lens will help minimize blind spots compared to the wide-angle lens. When angle of the lens is growing because nonlinear radial distortion also increase, calibration was used after initializing and optimizing the distortion constant in order to ensure accuracy. In addition, the original image was analyzed along with calibration to remove fog and calibrate brightness and thereby enable detection even when visibility is obstructed due to light and dark adaptations from foggy situations or sudden changes in illumination. Fog removal generally takes a considerably significant amount of time to calculate. Thus in order to reduce the calculation time, remove the fog used the major fog removal algorithm Dark Channel Prior. While Gamma Correction was used to calibrate brightness, a brightness and contrast evaluation was conducted on the image in order to determine the Gamma Value needed for correction. The evaluation used only a part instead of the entirety of the image in order to reduce the time allotted to calculation. When the brightness and contrast values were calculated, those values were used to decided Gamma value and to correct the entire image. The brightness correction and fog removal were processed in parallel, and the images were registered as a single image to minimize the calculation time needed for all the processes. Then the feature extraction method HOG was used to detect the vehicle in the corrected image. As a result, it took 0.064 seconds per frame to detect the vehicle using image correction as proposed herein, which showed a 7.5% improvement in detection rate compared to the existing vehicle detection method.

• 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.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.15B no.2
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• pp.87-94
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a new vision-based fire detection method for a real-life application. Most previous vision-based methods using color information and temporal variation of pixel produce frequent false alarms because they used a lot of heuristic features. Furthermore there is also computation delay for accurate fire detection. To overcome these problems, we first detected candidated fire regions by using background modeling and color model of fire. Then we made probabilistic models of fire by using a fact that fire pixel values of consecutive frames are changed constantly and applied them to a Bayesian Network. In this paper we used two level Bayesian network, which contains the intermediate nodes and uses four skewnesses for evidence at each node. Skewness of R normalized with intensity and skewnesses of three high frequency components obtained through wavelet transform. The proposed system has been successfully applied to many fire detection tasks in real world environment and distinguishes fire from moving objects having fire color.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.57-66
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• 2017

Emotional image quality optimization methodologies are investigated using technological image quality controls based on the eye tests of various image samples. The images are evaluated based on various contrast, lightness and saturation image quality metric tone curves. The order of importance to image quality enhancements is contrast, saturation and brightness. The slopes of emotional image qualities with respect to technical image quality metric changes are found to be composed of mathematical function modelling with nearly zero, intermediate and maximum slope regions in general, which can reflect well known log and saturated as well as conventional reverse U shape natures. Image quality improvements are analyzed not only with just single but also with multiple image quality metrics. To ease the unified image quality metric analysis and control, a new function is presented to utilize both the newly found and conventional emotional image quality behaviors. It is found that the overall image quality enhancement can be realized only in a few limited cases of multiple image quality metric controls. It is also found that the kinds of image quality enhancement methodologies are not strongly dependent on image contents (genre).

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.748-753
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• 2012

In this paper, Face recognition algorithm is designed based on optimized pRBFNNs pattern classifier using three-dimensional scanner. Generally two-dimensional image-based face recognition system enables us to extract the facial features using gray-level of images. The environmental variation parameters such as natural sunlight, artificial light and face pose lead to the deterioration of the performance of the system. In this paper, the proposed face recognition algorithm is designed by using three-dimensional scanner to overcome the drawback of two-dimensional face recognition system. First face shape is scanned using three-dimensional scanner and then the pose of scanned face is converted to front image through pose compensation process. Secondly, data with face depth is extracted using point signature method. Finally, the recognition performance is confirmed by using the optimized pRBFNNs for solving high-dimensional pattern recognition problems.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.193-201
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• 2006

This paper presents a method that allows for detection of all rapid and gradual scene changes. The method features a combination of the current color histogram and the local $X^{2}-test$. For the purpose of this paper, the $X^{2}-test$ scheme outperforming existing histogram-based algorithms was transformed, and a local $X^{2}-test$ in which weights were applied in accordance with the degree of brightness was used to increase detection efficiency in the segmentation of color values. This Method allows for analysis and segmentation of complex time-varying images in the most general and standardized manner possible Experiments were performed to compare the proposed local $X^{2}-test$ method with the current $X^{2}-test$ method.