• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.50-58
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a color transient improvement (CTI) algorithm based on image fusion to improve the color transient in the television(TV) receiver or in the MPEG decoder. Video image signals are composed of one luminance and two chrominance components, and the chrominance signals have been more band-limited than the luminance signals since the human eyes usually cannot perceive changes in chrominance over small areas. However, nowadays, as the advanced media like high-definition TV(HDTV) is developed, the blurring of color is perceived visually and affects the image quality. The proposed CTI method improves the transient of chrominance signals by exploiting the high-frequency information of the luminance signal. The high-frequency component extracted from the luminance signal is modified by spatially adaptive weights and added to the input chrominance signals. The spatially adaptive weight is estimated to minimize the ${\iota}_2-norm$ of the error between the original and the estimated chrominance signals in a local window. Experimental results with various test images show that the proposed algorithm produces steep and natural color edge transition and the proposed method outperforms conventional algorithms in terms of both visual and numerical criteria.