• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.4 no.6
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• pp.1209-1221
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• 2010

Three dimensional (3D) video is expected to be an important application for broadcast and IP streaming services. One of the main limitations for the transmission of 3D video over IP networks is network bandwidth mismatch due to the large size of 3D data, which causes fatal decoding errors and mosaic-like damage. This paper presents a novel selective frame discard method to address the problem. The main idea of the proposed method is the symmetrical discard of the two dimensional (2D) video frame and the depth map frame. Also, the frames to be discarded are selected after additional consideration of the playback deadline, the network bandwidth, and the inter-frame dependency relationship within a group of pictures (GOP). It enables the efficient utilization of the network bandwidth and high quality 3D IPTV service. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the media quality of 3D video streaming even in the case of bad network conditions.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.437-446
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• 2012

A face detection algorithms using two-dimensional (2-D) intensity or color images have been studied for decades. Recently, with the development of low-cost range sensor, three-dimensional (3-D) information (i.e., depth image that represents the distance between a camera and objects) can be easily used to reliably extract facial features. Most people have a similar pattern of 3-D facial structure. This paper proposes a face detection method using intensity and depth images. At first, adaboost algorithm using intensity image classifies face and nonface candidate regions. Each candidate region is divided into $5{\times}5$ blocks and depth values are averaged in each block. Then, $5{\times}5$ block rank pattern is constructed by sorting block averages of depth values. Finally, candidate regions are classified as face and nonface regions by matching the constructed depth map based block rank patterns and a template pattern that is generated from training data set. For template matching, the $5{\times}5$ template block rank pattern is prior constructed by averaging block ranks using training data set. The proposed algorithm is tested on real images obtained by Kinect range sensor. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm effectively eliminates most false positives with true positives well preserved.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.140-147
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose a method for real-time depth image refinement. In order to improve the quality of the depth map acquired from Kinect camera, we employ constant memory and texture memory which are suitable for a 2D image processing in the graphics processing unit (GPU). In addition, we applied the joint bilateral filter (JBF) in parallel to accelerate the overall execution. To enhance the quality of the depth image, we applied the JBF hierarchically using the compute unified device architecture (CUDA). Finally, we obtain the refined depth image. Experimental results showed that the proposed real-time depth image refinement algorithm improved the subjective quality of the depth image and the computational time was 260 frames per second.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.242-252
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• 2014

Since July of 2012, the 3D video extension of H.264/AVC has been under development to support the multi-view video plus depth format. In 3D video applications such as multi-view and free-view point applications, synthesized views are generated using coded texture video and coded depth video. Such synthesized views can be distorted by quantization noise and inaccuracy of 3D wrapping positions, thus it is important to improve their quality where possible. To achieve this, the relationship among the depth video, texture video, and synthesized view is investigated herein. Based on this investigation, an edge noise suppression filtering process to preserve the edges of the depth video and a method based on a total variation approach to maximum a posteriori probability estimates for reducing the quantization noise of the coded texture video. The experiment results show that the proposed methods improve the peak signal-to-noise ratio and visual quality of a synthesized view compared to a synthesized view without post processing methods.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.502-508
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• 2015

Stereo images have an advantage of calculating depth(distance) values which can not analyze from 2-D images. However, depth information obtained by stereo images has due to following reasons: it can be obtained by computation process; mismatching occurs when stereo matching is processing in occlusion which has an effect on accuracy of calculating depth information. Also, if global method is used for stereo matching, it needs a lot of computation. Therefore, this paper proposes the method obtaining disparity map which can reduce computation time and has higher accuracy than established method. Edge extraction which is image segmentation based on feature is used for improving accuracy and reducing computation time. Color K-Means method which is image segmentation based on color estimates correlation of objects in an image. And it extracts region of interest for applying Loopy Belief Propagation(LBP). For this, disparity map can be compensated by considering correlation of objects in the image. And it can reduce computation time because of calculating region of interest not all pixels. As a result, disparity map has more accurate and the proposed method reduces computation time.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.11B
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• pp.1283-1288
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• 2009

In general, a 3D computer graphic model is being used to generate a digital hologram as theinput information because the 3D information of an object can be extracted from a 3D model, easily. The 3D information of a real scene can be extracted by using a depth camera. The 3D information, point cloud, corresponding to real scene is extracted from a taken image pair, a gray texture and a depth map, by a depth camera. The extracted point cloud is used to generate a digital hologram as input information. The digital hologram is generated by using the coherent holographic stereogram, which is a fast digital hologram generation algorithm based on segmentation. The generated digital hologram using the taken image pair by a depth camera is reconstructed by the Fresnel approximation. By this method, the digital hologram corresponding to a real scene or a real object could be generated by using the fast digital hologram generation algorithm. Furthermore, experimental results are satisfactory.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.123-130
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• 1997

In this paper, we present an original stereo vision system which comprises two process: 1. An image segmentation algorithm based on new concept called declivity and using automatic thresholds. 2. A new stereo matching algorithm based on an optimal path search. This path is obtained by dynamic programming method which uses the threshold values calculated during the segmentation process. At present, a complete depth map of indoor scene only needs about 3 s on a Sun workstation IPX, and this time will be reduced to a few tenth of second on a specialised architecture based on several DSPs which is currently under consideration.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.60-65
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• 2013

In this paper, we propose a high-resolution disparity map generation method using a low-resolution time-of-flight (TOF) depth camera and color camera. The TOF depth camera is efficient since it measures the range information of objects using the infra-red (IR) signal in real-time. It also quantizes the range information and provides the depth image. However, there are some problems of the TOF depth camera, such as noise and lens distortion. Moreover, the output resolution of the TOF depth camera is too small for 3D applications. Therefore, it is essential to not only reduce the noise and distortion but also enlarge the output resolution of the TOF depth image. Our proposed method generates a depth map for a color image using the TOF camera and the color camera simultaneously. We warp the depth value at each pixel to the color image position. The color image is segmented using the mean-shift segmentation method. We define a cost function that consists of color values and segmented color values. We apply a weighted average filter whose weighting factor is defined by the random walk probability using the defined cost function of the block. Experimental results show that the proposed method generates the depth map efficiently and we can reconstruct good virtual view images.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.645-650
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• 2010

In this paper, we present the effect of binocular cues which plays crucial role for the visualization of a stereoscopic or 3D image. This study is useful in extracting depth and disparity information by image processing technique. A linear relation between the object distance and the image distance is presented to discuss the cause of cybersickness. In the experimental results, three dimensional view of the depth map between the 2D images is shown. A median filter is used to reduce the noises available in the disparity map image. After the median filter, two filter algorithms such as 'Gabor' filter and 'Canny' filter are tested for disparity visualization between two images. The 'Gabor' filter is to estimate the disparity by texture extraction and discrimination methods of the two images, and the 'Canny' filter is used to visualize the disparity by edge detection of the two color images obtained from stereoscopic cameras. The 'Canny' filter is better choice for estimating the disparity rather than the 'Gabor' filter because the 'Canny' filter is much more efficient than 'Gabor' filter in terms of detecting the edges. 'Canny' filter changes the color images directly into color edges without converting them into the grayscale. As a result, more clear edges of the stereo images as compared to the edge detection by 'Gabor' filter can be obtained. Since the main goal of the research is to estimate the horizontal disparity of all possible regions or edges of the images, thus the 'Canny' filter is proposed for decipherable visualization of the disparity.