• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.36 no.6C
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• pp.349-354
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• 2011

Passive millimeter wave imaging has the capability of detecting concealed objects under clothing. Also, passive millimeter imaging can obtain interpretable images under low visibility conditions like rain, fog, smoke, and dust. However, the image quality is often degraded due to low spatial resolution, low signal level, and low temperature resolution. This paper addresses image registration and fusion between passive millimeter images and visual images. The goal of this study is to combine and visualize two different types of information together: human subject's identity and concealed objects. The image registration process is composed of body boundary detection and an affine transform maximizing cross-correlation coefficients of two edge images. The image fusion process comprises three stages: discrete wavelet transform for image decomposition, a fusion rule for merging the coefficients, and the inverse transform for image synthesis. In the experiments, various types of metallic and non-metallic objects such as a knife, gel or liquid type beauty aids and a phone are detected by passive millimeter wave imaging. The registration and fusion process can visualize the meaningful information from two different types of sensors.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.49-59
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• 2008

SIFT(Scale Invariant Feature Transform) is an algorithm to extract vectors at pixels around keypoints, in which the pixel colors are very different from neighbors, such as vortices and edges of an object. The SIFT algorithm is being actively researched for various image processing applications including 3-D image constructions, and its most computation-intensive stage is a keypoint localization. In this paper, we develope a fixed-point model of the keypoint localization and propose its efficient hardware architecture for embedded applications. The bit-length of key variables are determined based on two performance measures: localization accuracy and error rate. Comparing with the original algorithm (implemented in Matlab), the accuracy and error rate of the proposed fixed point model are 93.57% and 2.72% respectively. In addition, we found that most of missing keypoints appeared at the edges of an object which are not very important in the case of keypoints matching. We estimate that the hardware implementation will give processing speed of $10{\sim}15\;frame/sec$, while its fixed point implementation on Pentium Core2Duo (2.13 GHz) and ARM9 (400 MHz) takes 10 seconds and one hour each to process a frame.