• 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.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.1481-1490
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• 2017

This paper presents an image quality enhancement algorithm for dark image acquired under poor lighting condition. Various retinex algorithms which are human perception-based image processing methods were proposed to solve this problem. Although MSR(Multi-Scale Retinex) among these algorithm works well under most lighting condition, it shows color degradation because their separate nonlinear processing of RGB color channels. To compensate for the loss of the color, MSRCR(Multi-Scale Retinex with Color Restoration) was proposed. However, it requires high computational load and has additional parameters that need to be adjusted according to input image. In order to overcome this problem, a new retinex algorithm based on MSR is proposed in this paper. The proposed method consists of V channel MSR, saturation correction, and separate contrast enhancement process. Experimental results show that the subjective and objective image quality of the proposed method better than those of the conventional methods.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers P
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.22-29
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose an adaptive color enhancement algorithm. It is used for the flat panel displays (FPDs) such as LCD, PDP, and so on. The proposed algorithm consists of an adaptive linear approximation CDF(Cumulative Density Function) algorithm and an adaptive saturation enhancement algorithm. The one is for contrast enhancement which prevents an image from the distortion by luminance transient of an input image. The other is the algorithm which improves the saturation without the contour artifact and over-saturation, whose problems are generated during the enhancing saturation. In addition, it allows to achieve the high quality image using the saturation enhancement method for a preferred color of original image. Visual test and standard deviation of their histograms have been applied to evaluate the resultant output images of the proposed algorithm.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.99-107
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• 2019

Retinex-based image enhancement is a technique that utilizes the property that the human visual characteristics are sensitive to the difference from the surrounding pixel value rather than the pixel value itself. These Retinex-based algorithms show different characteristics of the improved image depending on the applied color space or gamma correction. In this paper, we set eight different experimental conditions according to the application of color space and gamma correction, and analyze the objective and subjective performance of each Retinex based image enhancement algorithm and apply it to the implementation of Retinex based algorithm. In the case of gamma correction, quantitative low entropy images and low contrast images are obtained. The application of Retinex technique in HSI color space rather than RGB color space is found to be high in overall subjective image quality as well as maintaining color.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.8-16
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• 2012

An image obtained from a low light environment results in a low-exposure problem caused by non-ideal camera settings, i.e. aperture size and shutter speed. Of particular note, the multiple color-filter aperture (MCA) system inherently suffers from low-exposure problems and performance degradation in its image classification and registration processes due to its finite size of the apertures. In this context, this paper presents a novel method for the color enhancement of low-exposure images and its application to color shift model-based MCA system for image refocusing. Although various histogram equalization (HE) approaches have been proposed, they tend to distort the color information of the processed image due to the range limits of the histogram. The proposed color enhancement algorithm enhances the global brightness by analyzing the basic cause of the low-exposure phenomenon, and then compensates for the contrast degradation artifacts by using an adaptive histogram specification. We also apply the proposed algorithm to the preprocessing step of the refocusing technique in the MCA system to enhance the color image. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method can enhance the contrast of any low-exposure color image acquired by a conventional camera, and is suitable for commercial low-cost, high-quality imaging devices, such as consumer-grade camcorders, real-time 3D reconstruction systems, digital, and computational cameras.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.60-67
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• 2015

This paper proposes an image-dependent color image enhancement method that uses adaptive luminance enhancement and color emphasis. It effectively enhances details of low-light regions while maintaining well-balanced luminance and color information. To compare the structure similarity and naturalness, we used the tone mapped image quality index (TMQI). The proposed method maintained better structure similarity in the enhanced image than did the space-variant luminance map (SVLM) method or the adaptive and integrated neighborhood dependent approach for nonlinear enhancement (AINDANE). The proposed method required the smallest computation time among the three algorithms. The proposed method can be easily implemented using the field-programmable gate array (FPGA), with low hardware resources and with better performance in terms of similarity.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2007.08a
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• pp.1035-1038
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a color image improvement method. The proposed algorithms are classified with the adaptive contrast stretching method for contrast enhancement and the adaptive saturation enhancement method for saturation enhancement. The adaptive contrast stretching method is to compensate a significant change of brightness while luminance is processed. The adaptive saturation enhancement method inhibits its saturation from de-saturation and oversaturation while chrominance is processed. The proposed algorithms are focused on a preference color processing in order to generate better image quality than the algorithms focused on a uniform color processing for human vision.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2013.05a
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• pp.215-218
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• 2013

In this paper, we proposed a method for enhancement of color images with sky regions. The input image is converted into HSV space and then sky and non-sky regions are separated. For sky region, saturation enhancement is performed for each pixel based on the enhancement factor calculated from the average saturation of its local neighborhood. On the other hand, for the non-sky region, the enhancement is applied only on the luminance value (V) component of the HSV color image, which is performed in two steps. The luminance enhancement, which is also called as dynamic range compression, is carried out using nonlinear transfer function. Again, each pixel is further enhanced for the adjustment of the image contrast depending upon the center pixel and its neighborhood pixel values. At last, the original H and V component image and enhanced S component image for the sky region, and original H and S component image and enhanced V component image for the non-sky region are converted back to RGB image.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1233-1243
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• 2015

The contrast enhancement is great challenge in the image processing when images are suffering from poor contrast problem. Therefore, in order to overcome this problem an automatic method is proposed for contrast enhancement of natural color images. The proposed method consist of two stages: in first stage lightness component in YIQ color space is normalized by sigmoid function after the adaptive histogram equalization is applied on Y component and in second stage automatic color contrast enhancement algorithm is applied on output of the first stage. The proposed algorithm is tested on different NASA color images, hyperspectral color images and other types of natural color images. The performance of proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms in terms of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor. The higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor imply that the visual quality of the enhanced image is good. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed algorithm provides higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor as compared to other existing contrast enhancement algorithms. The proposed algorithm also provides better visual enhancement results as compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.30B no.5
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• pp.103-108
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• 1993

An image can be largely corrupted by the ambient illuminant, so that the image enhancement to restory natural color without respect to the ambient illuminant is needed. It this paper, a new color image enhancement technique based on color constancy is proposed. To enhance the image quality, higher volues of contrast and saturation are preferred, but their excessive values make an image unnatural. Since the color constancy processing preserves only hue, while reducing the dynamic range of lightness and saturation,the technique is needed in order to compensate this phenomenon. The proposed method transforms and increases lightness and saturation simultaneously to avoid the complexity in the related transformation by analyzing the relationship between the RGB and modified IHS coordinate system.