• Current Optics and Photonics
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.153-164
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• 2018

In semiconductor manufacturing, critical dimensions indicate the features of patterns formed by the semiconductor process. The purpose of measuring critical dimensions is to confirm whether patterns are made as intended. The deposition process for an organic light emitting diode (OLED) forms a luminous organic layer on the thin-film transistor electrode. The position of this organic layer greatly affects the luminescent performance of an OLED. Thus, a system for measuring the position of the organic layer from outside of the vacuum chamber in real-time is desired for monitoring the deposition process. Typically, imaging from large stand-off distances results in low spatial resolution because of diffraction blur, and it is difficult to attain an adequate industrial-level measurement. The proposed method offers a new superresolution single-image using a conversion formula between two different optical systems obtained by a deep learning technique. This formula converts an image measured at long distance and with low-resolution optics into one image as if it were measured with high-resolution optics. The performance of this method is evaluated with various samples in terms of spatial resolution and measurement performance.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.131-136
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• 2007

This paper proposes a new approach to eliminate the reflectance component for the detection of text in color images. Color images, printed by color printing technology, normally have an illumination component as well as a reflectance component. It is well known that a reflectance component usually obstructs the task of detecting and recognizing objects like texts in the scene, since it blurs out an overall image. We have developed an approach that efficiently removes reflectance components while preserving illumination components. We decided whether an input image hits Normal or Polarized for determining the light environment, using the histogram which consisted of a red component. We were able to go ahead through the ability to extract by reducing the blur phenomenon of text by light because reflection component by an illumination change and removed it and extracted text. The experimental results have shown a superior performance even when an image has a complex background. Text detection and recognition performance is influenced by changing the illumination condition. Our method is robust to the images with different illumination conditions.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.202-207
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• 2021

One of the most important tasks in image processing is noise filtering. Noise removal in image is a difficult task due to many reasons such as nonstationary sequences and corrupted by various types of noise. Human's visual perception is heavily based on the edge information. Thus, noise filtering must preserve edges. To remove the noise, we usually use the square-shaped median filter. They possess mathematical simplicity but have the disadvantages that blur the edges. In this paper we consider a new technique for image restoration using a weighted octagonal median filter. The technique consists of simple hypothesis test for edge detection, and we use the weighted octagonal-shaped moving window. The new technique is applied to noise corrupted image and experimental results are compared to the results of the square-shaped median filter and the cross-shaped median filter.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1904-1926
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• 2016

Iris recognition for biometric personnel identification has gained much interest owing to the increasing concern with security today. The image quality plays a major role in the performance of iris recognition systems. When capturing an iris image under uncontrolled conditions and dealing with non-cooperative people, the chance of getting non-ideal images is very high owing to poor focus, off-angle, noise, motion blur, occlusion of eyelashes and eyelids, and wearing glasses. In order to improve the accuracy of iris recognition while dealing with non-ideal iris images, we propose a novel algorithm that improves the quality of degraded iris images. First, the iris image is localized properly to obtain accurate iris boundary detection, and then the iris image is normalized to obtain a fixed size. Second, the valid region (iris region) is extracted from the segmented iris image to obtain only the iris region. Third, to get a well-distributed texture image, bilinear interpolation is used on the segmented valid iris gray image. Using contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) enhances the low contrast of the resulting interpolated image. The results of CLAHE are further improved by stretching the maximum and minimum values to 0-255 by using histogram-stretching technique. The gray texture information is extracted by 1D Gabor filters while the Hamming distance technique is chosen as a metric for recognition. The NICE-II training dataset taken from UBRIS.v2 was used for the experiment. Results of the proposed method outperformed other methods in terms of equal error rate (EER).

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.453-462
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• 2021

A lot of license plate data is required for car number recognition. License plate data needs to be balanced from past license plates to the latest license plates. However, it is difficult to obtain data from the actual past license plate to the latest ones. In order to solve this problem, a license plate recognition study through deep learning is being conducted by creating a synthetic license plates. Since the synthetic data have differences from real data, and various data augmentation techniques are used to solve these problems. Existing data augmentation simply used methods such as brightness, rotation, affine transformation, blur, and noise. In this paper, we apply a style transformation method that transforms synthetic data into real-world data styles with data augmentation methods. In addition, real license plate data are noisy when it is captured from a distance and under the dark environment. If we simply recognize characters with input data, chances of misrecognition are high. To improve character recognition, in this paper, we applied the DeblurGANv2 method as a quality improvement method for character recognition, increasing the accuracy of license plate recognition. The method of deep learning for license plate detection and license plate number recognition used YOLO-V5. To determine the performance of the synthetic license plate data, we construct a test set by collecting our own secured license plates. License plate detection without style conversion recorded 0.614 mAP. As a result of applying the style transformation, we confirm that the license plate detection performance was improved by recording 0.679mAP. In addition, the successul detection rate without image enhancement was 0.872, and the detection rate was 0.915 after image enhancement, confirming that the performance improved.

• Journal of the Korean Wood Science and Technology
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.37-47
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• 2009

For the inspection of wood, machine vision is the most common automated inspection method used at present. It is required to sort wood products by grade and to locate surface defects prior to cut-up. Many different sensing methods have been applied to inspection of wood including optical, ultrasonic, X-ray sensing in the wood industry. Nowadays the scanning system mainly employs CCD line-scan camera to meet the needs of accurate detection of lumber defects and real-time image processing. But this system needs exact feeding system and low deviation of lumber thickness. In this study low cost CCD area sensor was used for the development of image processing system for lumber being fed. When domestic red pine being fed on the conveyer belt, lumber images of irregular term of captured area were acquired because belt conveyor slipped between belt and roller. To overcome incorrect image merging by the unstable feeding speed of belt conveyor, it was applied template matching algorithm which was a measure of the similarity between the pattern of current image and the next one. Feeding the lumber over 13.8 m/min, general area sensor generates unreadable image pattern by the motion blur. The red channel of RGB filter showed a good performance for removing background of the green conveyor belt from merged image. Threshold value reduction method that was a image-based thresholding algorithm performed well for knot detection.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.2 s.308
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• pp.19-29
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• 2006

As the security of personal information is becoming more important in mobile phones, we are starting to apply iris recognition technology to these devices. In conventional iris recognition, magnified iris images are required. For that, it has been necessary to use large magnified zoom & focus lens camera to capture images, but due to the requirement about low size and cost of mobile phones, the zoom & focus lens are difficult to be used. However, with rapid developments and multimedia convergence trends in mobile phones, more and more companies have built mega-pixel cameras into their mobile phones. These devices make it possible to capture a magnified iris image without zoom & focus lens. Although facial images are captured far away from the user using a mega-pixel camera, the captured iris region possesses sufficient pixel information for iris recognition. However, in this case, the eye region should be detected for accurate iris recognition in facial images. So, we propose a new fast iris detection method, which is appropriate for mobile phones based on corneal specular reflection. To detect specular reflection robustly, we propose the theoretical background of estimating the size and brightness of specular reflection based on eye, camera and illuminator models. In addition, we use the successive On/Off scheme of the illuminator to detect the optical/motion blurring and sunlight effect on input image. Experimental results show that total processing time(detecting iris region) is on average 65ms on a Samsung SCH-S2300 (with 150MHz ARM 9 CPU) mobile phone. The rate of correct iris detection is 99% (about indoor images) and 98.5% (about outdoor images).

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.26-32
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• 2012

The magnification technique has recently become popular in bone radiography, mammography and other diagnostic examination. However, because of the finite size of X-ray focal spot, the magnification influences various imaging properties with resolution, noise and contrast. The purpose of study is to investigate the influence of magnification and focal spot size on digital imaging system using eDQE (effective detective quantum efficiency). Effective DQE is a metric reflecting overall system response including focal spot blur, magnification, scatter and grid response. The adult chest phantom employed in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was used to derive eDQE from eMTF (effective modulation transfer function), eNPS (effective noise power spectrum), scatter fraction and transmission fraction. According to results, spatial frequencies that eMTF is 10% with the magnification factor of 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 and 2.0 are 2.76, 2.21, 1.78, 1.49 and 1.26 lp/mm respectively using small focal spot. The spatial frequencies that eMTF is 10% with the magnification factor of 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 and 2.0 are 2.21, 1.66, 1.25, 0.93 and 0.73 lp/mm respectively using large focal spot. The eMTFs and eDQEs decreases with increasing magnification factor. Although there are no significant differences with focal spot size on eDQE (0), the eDQEs drops more sharply with large focal spot than small focal spot. The magnification imaging can enlarge the small size lesion and improve the contrast due to decrease of effective noise and scatter with air-gap effect. The enlargement of the image size can be helpful for visual detection of small image. However, focal spot blurring caused by finite size of focal spot shows more significant impact on spatial resolution than the improvement of other metrics resulted by magnification effect. Based on these results, appropriate magnification factor and focal spot size should be established to perform magnification imaging with digital radiography system.