• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.341-363
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• 2016

Haze or fog is a common natural phenomenon. In foggy weather, the captured pictures are difficult to be applied to computer vision system, such as road traffic detection, target tracking, etc. Therefore, the image dehazing technique has become a hotspot in the field of image processing. This paper presents an overview of the existing achievements on the image dehazing technique. The intent of this paper is not to review all the relevant works that have appeared in the literature, but rather to focus on two main works, that is, image dehazing scheme based on atmospheric veil and image dehazing scheme based on dark channel prior. After the overview and a comparative study, we propose an improved image dehazing method, which is based on two image dehazing schemes mentioned above. Our image dehazing method can obtain the fog-free images by proposing a more desirable atmospheric veil and estimating atmospheric light more accurately. In addition, we adjust the transmission of the sky regions and conduct tone mapping for the obtained images. Compared with other state of the art algorithms, experiment results show that images recovered by our algorithm are clearer and more natural, especially at distant scene and places where scene depth jumps abruptly.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.257-264
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• 2019

This paper presents a single image haze removal method via a pixel-based joint BDCP (bright and dark channel prior) and a hierarchical bilateral filter in order to reduce computational complexity and memory requirement while improving the dehazing performance. Pixel-based joint BDCP reduces the computational complexity compared to the patch-based DCP, while making it possible to estimate the atmospheric light in pixel unit and the transmission more accurately. Moreover the bilateral filter, which can smooth an image effectively while preserving edges, refines the transmission to reduce the halo effects, and its hierarchical structure applied to edges only prevents the increase of complexity from the iterative application. Experimental results on various hazy images show that the proposed method exhibits excellent haze removal performance with low computational complexity compared to the conventional methods, and thus it can be applied in various fields.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.738-747
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• 2015

It is difficult to use a recognition algorithm of an image in a foggy environment because the color and edge information is removed. One of the famous defogging algorithm is haze removal by using 'Dark Channel Prior(DCP)' which is used to predict for transmission rate using color information of an image and eliminates fog from the image. However, in case that the image has factors such as sunset or yellow dust, there is overemphasized problem on the color of certain channel after haze removal. Furthermore, in case that the image includes an object containing high RGB channel, the transmission related to this area causes a misestimated issue. In this paper, we purpose an enhanced fog elimination algorithm by using improved color normalization and haze rate revision which correct mis-estimation haze area on the basis of color information and edge information of an image. By eliminating the color distortion, we can obtain more natural clean image from the haze image.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.145-151
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• 2014

This paper proposes an image haze removal algorithm for a single image. The conventional Dark Channel Prior(DCP) algorithm estimates a transmission map using the dark information in an image, and the haze regions are then detected using a matting algorithm. However, since the DCP algorithm uses block-based processing, block artifacts are invariably formed in the transmission map. To solve this problem, the proposed algorithm generates a modified transmission map using a Hidden Markov Random Field(HMRF) and Expectation-Maximization(EM) algorithm. Experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm is superior to conventional algorithms in image haze removal.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.229-234
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• 2020

Dehazing significantly improves image quality by restoring the loss of contrast and color saturation for images taken in the presence. However, when applied to images not taken according to the prior information, dehazing can cause unintended degradation of image quality. To avoid unintended degradations, we present a hazy scene detection algorithm using a single image based on the distributions of hue, saturation, and dark channel. Through a heuristic approach, we find out statistical characteristics of the distribution of hue, saturation, and dark channels in the hazy scene and make a detection model using them. The proposed method can precede the dehazing to prevent unintended degradation. The detection performance evaluated with a set of test images shows a high hit rate with a low false alarm ratio. Ultimately the proposed method can be used to control the effect of dehazing so that the dehazing can be applied to wide variety of images without unintended degradation of image quality.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.645-652
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• 2015

In underwater, such as fish farm and sea, turbidity is increased by water droplets and various suspended, therefore light attenuation occurs depending on the depth also caused by the scattering effect of light float. In this paper, in order to improve the visibility of underwater images obtained from these aquatic environment, we propose a visibility enhancement method using a haze removal method based on dark channel prior and a trained color transform model. In order to train a color transform model, we used underwater pattern images captured from Pohang and Yeosu, and to measure the performance of the proposed method, we carried out experiment of visibility enhancement using underwater images collected from Yeosu, Geomundo and Philippines. The results show that the proposed method can improve the visibility of underwater images of various locations.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Navigation and Port Research Conference
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.75-76
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• 2022

본 연구에서는 해상 항로표지 안전 확보의 중요서 증대에 따라 항로표 소실의 주된 원인이 되는 선박과의 충돌을 사전에 막고 해상의 선박들에게 해상 기상 정보를 이용한 안전 서비스를 위하여 영상을 기반으로 해무의 강도를 측정하기 위한 판단 기준을 제시하는 목적으로 Dark Channel Prior를 이용한 알고리즘을 제시한다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.168-176
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• 2014

Detecting moving objects from a video sequence is a fundamental and critical task in video surveillance, traffic monitoring and analysis, and human detection and tracking. It is very difficult to detect moving objects in a video sequence degraded by the environmental factor such as fog. In particular, the color of an object become similar to the neighbor and it reduces the saturation, thus making it very difficult to distinguish the object from the background. For such a reason, it is shown that the performance and reliability of object detection and tracking are poor in the foggy weather. In this paper, we propose a novel method to improve the performance of object detection, combining a haze removal algorithm and a local histogram-based object tracking method. For the quantitative evaluation of the proposed system, information retrieval measurements, recall and precision, are used to quantify how well the performance is improved before and after the haze removal. As a result, the visibility of the image is enhanced and the performance of objects detection is improved.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.417-426
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• 2023

To improve the effect of image restoration and solve the image detail loss, an image dehazing enhancement algorithm based on mean guided filtering is proposed. The superpixel calculation method is used to pre-segment the original foggy image to obtain different sub-regions. The Ncut algorithm is used to segment the original image, and it outputs the segmented image until there is no more region merging in the image. By means of the mean-guided filtering method, the minimum value is selected as the value of the current pixel point in the local small block of the dark image, and the dark primary color image is obtained, and its transmittance is calculated to obtain the image edge detection result. According to the prior law of dark channel, a classic image dehazing enhancement model is established, and the model is combined with a median filter with low computational complexity to denoise the image in real time and maintain the jump of the mutation area to achieve image dehazing enhancement. The experimental results show that the image dehazing and enhancement effect of the proposed algorithm has obvious advantages, can retain a large amount of image detail information, and the values of information entropy, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity are high. The research innovatively combines a variety of methods to achieve image dehazing and improve the quality effect. Through segmentation, filtering, denoising and other operations, the image quality is effectively improved, which provides an important reference for the improvement of image processing technology.