• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.7-11
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• 2020

Enormous methods have been proposed for the detection and segmentation of blur and non-blur regions of the images. Due to the limited available information about the blur type, scenario and the level of blurriness, detection and segmentation is a challenging task. Hence, the performance of the blur measure operators is an essential factor and needs improvement to attain perfection. In this paper, we propose an effective blur measure based on the local binary pattern (LBP) with the adaptive threshold for blur detection. The sharpness metric developed based on LBP uses a fixed threshold irrespective of the blur type and level which may not be suitable for images with large variations in imaging conditions and blur type and level. Contradictory, the proposed measure uses an adaptive threshold for each image based on the image and the blur properties to generate an improved sharpness metric. The adaptive threshold is computed based on the model learned through the support vector machine (SVM). The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using a well-known dataset and compared with five state-of-the-art methods. The comparative analysis reveals that the proposed method performs significantly better qualitatively and quantitatively against all the methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.96-104
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a no-reference objective Quality assessment metrics of image. The blockiness and blurring of edge areas which are sensitive to the human visual system are modeled as step functions. Blocking and blur metrics are obtained by estimating local visibility of blockiness and edge width, For the blocking metric, horizontal and vertical blocking lines are first determined by accumulating weighted differences of adjacent pixels and then the local visibility of blockiness at the intersection of blocking lines is obtained from the total difference of amplitudes of the 2-D step function which is modelled as a blocking region. The blurred input image is first re-blurred by a Gaussian blur kernel and an edge mask image is generated. In edge blocks, the local edge width is calculated from four directional projections (horizontal, vertical and two diagonal directions) using local extrema positions. In addition, the kurtosis and SSIM are used to compute the blur metric. The final no-reference objective metric is computed after those values are combined using an appropriate function. Experimental results show that the proposed objective metrics are highly correlated to the subjective data.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.459-470
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a method to upsample a low-resolution depth map to a high-resolution version. While conventional camera sensors produce high-resolution color images, the sizes of the depth maps of range/depth sensors are usually low. In this paper, we consider the utilization of high-frequency components to the conventional depth map interpolation methods such as bilinear, bicubic, and bilateral. The proposed method is composed of the three steps: high-frequency component extraction, high-frequency component application, and interpolation. Two objective evaluation measures such as sharpness degree and blur metric are used to examine the performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms other conventional methods by a factor of 2 in terms of sharpness degree. As well, a blur metric is reduced by a factor of 14 %.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.31-43
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• 2014

A depth map is an important component for stereoscopic image generation. Since the depth map acquired from a depth camera has a low resolution, upsamling a low-resolution depth map to a high-resolution one has been studied past decades. Upsampling methods are evaluated by objective evaluation tools such as PSNR, Sharpness Degree, Blur Metric. As well, the subjective quality is compared using virtual views generated by DIBR (depth image based rendering). However, works on the analysis of the relation between depth map upsampling and stereoscopic images are relatively few. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between subjective evaluation of stereoscopic images and objective performance of upsampling methods using cross correlation and linear regression. Experimental results demonstrate that the correlation of edge PSNR and visual fatigue is the highest and the blur metric has lowest correlation. Further, from the linear regression, we found relative weights of objective measurements. Further we introduce a formulae that can estimate 3D performance of conventional or new upsampling methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.127-136
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• 2013

This paper proposes a video deblurring algorithm which maintains uniform sharpness between frames. Unlike the previous algorithms using fixed parameters, the proposed algorithm keeps uniform sharpness by adjusting parameters for each frame. First, we estimate the initial blur kernel and perform deconvolution, then measure the sharpness of the deblurred image. In order to maintain uniform sharpness, we adjust the regularization parameter and kernel according to the examined sharpness, and perform deconvolution again. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves outstanding deblurring results while providing consistent sharpness.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.907-923
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• 2020

For the severe haze situation in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, conventional fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration prediction methods based on pollutant data face problems such as incomplete data, which may lead to poor prediction performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of predicting the PM2.5 concentration based on image analysis technology that combines image data, which can reflect the original weather conditions, with currently popular machine learning methods. First, based on local parameter estimation, autoregressive (AR) model analysis and local estimation of the increase in image blur, we extract features from the weather images using an approach inspired by free energy and a no-reference robust metric model. Next, we compare the coefficient energy and contrast difference of each pixel in the AR model and then use the percentages to calculate the image sharpness to derive the overall mass fraction. Furthermore, the results are compared. The relationship between residual value and PM2.5 concentration is fitted by generalized Gauss distribution (GGD) model. Finally, nonlinear mapping is performed via the wavelet neural network (WNN) method to obtain the PM2.5 concentration. Experimental results obtained on real data show that the proposed method offers an improved prediction accuracy and lower root mean square error (RMSE).

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.35 no.2B
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• pp.352-360
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• 2010

Supporting user perceptual QoE-guaranteed IP-based multimedia service such as IPTV and Mobile IPTV, we represent an efficient QoE-aware transport stream assessment schemes to apply realtime mobile IPTV's contents distorted by various network errors such as bandwidth, delay, jitter, and packet loss. This paper proposes in detail an efficient matching and QoE-aware measurement methods. The brightness of the digitized contents per each frames of transport streams is used and applied to reduced-reference method. The hybrid video quality metric is designed by QoE-indicators such as blur, block, edge busyness, and color error. We compare original with processed source to evaluate them in a high precision degree of accuracy.

• Journal of Information Display
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.1-5
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• 2008

Two new impulsive driving technologies for 120Hz liquid crystal display (LCD) panels are proposed to improve moving picture quality. One technology generates the dark frame using an adder and a shifter simply without using any look up tables (LUTs). It results in a cost effective impulsive scheme with motion picture quality comparable to that of high speed driving. The other is a backlight flashing method designed to avoid ghost images. The issue of ghost images caused by the slow response time of liquid crystal (LC) is solved by means of 120Hz overdriving and 120Hz backlight flashing. Using the perceived blur edge time (PBET) metric, measured moving picture response time (MPRT) values were 10.8ms and 4.4ms, respectively, while that of 120Hz high speed driving was 10.1ms.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.442-453
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• 2020

Underwater color images suffer from low visibility and color cast effects caused by light attenuation by water and floating particles. This study applied single image enhancement techniques to enhance the quality of underwater images and compared their performance with real underwater images taken in Korean waters. Dark channel prior (DCP), gradient transform, image fusion, and generative adversarial networks (GAN), such as cycleGAN and underwater GAN (UGAN), were considered for single image enhancement. Their performance was evaluated in terms of underwater image quality measure, underwater color image quality evaluation, gray-world assumption, and blur metric. The DCP saturated the underwater images to a specific greenish or bluish color tone and reduced the brightness of the background signal. The gradient transform method with two transmission maps were sensitive to the light source and highlighted the region exposed to light. Although image fusion enabled reasonable color correction, the object details were lost due to the last fusion step. CycleGAN corrected overall color tone relatively well but generated artifacts in the background. UGAN showed good visual quality and obtained the highest scores against all figures of merit (FOMs) by compensating for the colors and visibility compared to the other single enhancement methods.

• 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).