• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1159-1181
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• 2016

This study introduces an image-based 2D-to-3D conversion system that provides significant stereoscopic visual effects for humans. The linear and atmospheric perspective cues that compensate each other are employed to estimate depth information. Rather than retrieving a precise depth value for pixels from the depth cues, a direction angle of the image is estimated and then the depth gradient, in accordance with the direction angle, is integrated with superpixels to obtain the depth map. However, stereoscopic effects of synthesized views obtained from this depth map are limited and dissatisfy viewers. To obtain impressive visual effects, the viewer's main focus is considered, and thus salient object detection is performed to explore the significance region for visual attention. Then, the depth map is refined by locally modifying the depth values within the significance region. The refinement process not only maintains global depth consistency by correcting non-uniform depth values but also enhances the visual stereoscopic effect. Experimental results show that in subjective evaluation, the subjectively evaluated degree of satisfaction with the proposed method is approximately 7% greater than both existing commercial conversion software and state-of-the-art approach.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.11-19
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• 2024

Demand for small biomimetic robots that can carry out reconnaissance missions without being exposed to the enemy in underground spaces and narrow passages is increasing in order to increase the fighting power and survivability of soldiers in wartime situations. A small compound eye image sensor for environmental recognition has advantages such as small size, low aberration, wide angle of view, depth estimation, and HDR that can be used in various ways in the field of vision. However, due to the small lens size, the resolution is low, and the problem of resolution in the fused image obtained from the actual compound eye image occurs. This paper proposes a compound eye image quality enhancement algorithm based on Image Enhancement and ESRGAN to overcome the problem of low resolution. If the proposed algorithm is applied to compound eye image fusion images, image resolution and image quality can be improved, so it is expected that performance improvement results can be obtained in various studies using compound eye cameras.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.97-105
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• 2024

The examination needle used in ultrasound biopsy is a medical device used to determine whether there is an abnormality in the tissue. Typically, stainless steel is the standard material used for such needles; however, this study wanted to identify a material that could better enhance sound compared to traditional stainless steel. In this study, six types of needle materials available with the biopsy gun were inserted into pork and ultrasound images according to the curved probe and linear probe were evaluated using ultrasound equipment. The findings revealed significant improvements in ultrasound acoustic enhancement with alternative materials compared to stainless steel (p<0.05). The results regarding the depth of each ultrasound image using the curved probe showed that tungsten and brass had high sound enhancement(p<0.05), while with the linear probe, sound enhancement was high in brass, pla, aluminum, and copper(p<0.05). Due to these results, the previously used stainless needle showed lower ultrasound acoustic enhancement than the five types of materials being compared. Consequently, the outcomes of this study provide valuable insights for the development of new needle technologies aimed at minimizing patient risks and improving diagnostic accuracy.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.38C no.5
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• pp.409-419
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• 2013

Kinect released by Microsoft in November 2010 is a motion sensing camera in xbox360 and gives depth and color images. However, Kinect camera also generates holes and noise around object boundaries in the obtained images because it uses infrared pattern. Also, boundary flickering phenomenon occurs. Therefore, we propose a real-time virtual-view video synthesis algorithm which results in a high-quality virtual view by solving these problems. In the proposed algorithm, holes around the boundary are filled by using the joint bilateral filter. Color image is converted into intensity image and then flickering pixels are searched by analyzing the variation of intensity and depth images. Finally, boundary flickering phenomenon can be reduced by converting values of flickering pixels into the maximum pixel value of a previous depth image and virtual views are generated by applying 3D warping technique. Holes existing on regions that are not part of occlusion region are also filled with a center pixel value of the highest reliability block after the final block reliability is calculated by using a block based gradient searching algorithm with block reliability. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm generated the virtual view image in real-time.

• 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 the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.637-644
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• 2021

In general, in the fields of computer vision, robotics, and augmented reality, the importance of 3D space and 3D object detection and recognition technology has emerged. In particular, since it is possible to acquire RGB images and depth images in real time through an image sensor using Microsoft Kinect method, many changes have been made to object detection, tracking and recognition studies. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the quality of 3D reconstructed images by processing images acquired through a depth-based (RGB-Depth) camera on a multi-view camera system. In this paper, a method of removing noise outside an object by applying a mask acquired from a color image and a method of applying a combined filtering operation to obtain the difference in depth information between pixels inside the object is proposed. Through each experiment result, it was confirmed that the proposed method can effectively remove noise and improve the quality of 3D reconstructed image.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.408-417
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• 2003

In this paper, we have studied the enhancement of the acoustic image by combining bases of support for SFR (Spatial Frequency Response) taken at multi-frequencies. The scanning acoustic microscope system have been constructed using the quadrature detector that is able to measure the amplitude and phase of the reflected signal simultaneously. Both real and quadrature components of reflected signal have been acquired at 4.4 ㎒ to 5.6 ㎒ reliably and accurately. In this experimental result, better depth resolution can be obtained by numerically combining images taken at several different frequencies. Image intensity have been better about 3.4 times at multi-frequency than one at a single frequency.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.4
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• pp.639-642
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• 2012

Optical coherence tomography(OCT) can provide real-time and non-invasive subsurface imaging with ultra-high resolution of micrometer scale. However, conventional OCT systems generally have a limited imaging depth range within a depth of only 1-2 mm. To overcome the limitation, we have proposed an active surface tracking algorithm used in common-path Fourier-domain OCT system in order to extend the imaging depth range. The surface tracking algorithm based on the threshold and Savitzky-Golay filter of A-scan data was applied to real-time tracking. The algorithm has controlled a moving stage according to the sample's surface variance in real time. An OCT image obtained by the algorithm clearly show an extended imaging depth range. Consequently, the proposed algorithm demonstrated the potential for improving the conventional OCT systems with limitary depth range.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1997.10a
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• pp.40-43
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• 1997

This paper presents a 3D object recognition method for generation of 3D environmental map or obstacle recognition of mobile robots. An active light source projects a stripe pattern of light onto the object surface, while the camera observes the projected pattern from its offset point. The system consists of a laser unit and a camera on a pan/tilt device. The line segment in 2D camera image implies an object surface plane. The scaling, filtering, edge extraction, object extraction and line thinning are used for the enhancement of the light stripe image. We can get faithful depth informations of the object surface from the line segment interpretation. The performance of the proposed method has demonstrated in detail through the experiments for varies type objects. Experimental results show that the method has a good position accuracy, effectively eliminates optical noises in the image, greatly reduces memory requirement, and also greatly cut down the image processing time for the 3D object recognition compared to the conventional object recognition.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.294-299
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• 2007

For efficient and accurate diagnosis of ultrasound images, appropriate time gain compensation(TGC) and dynamic range(DR) control of ultrasound echo signals are important. TGC is used for compensating the attenuation of ultrasound echo signals along the depth, and DR controls the image contrast. In recent ultrasound systems, these two factors are automatically set by a system and/or manually adjusted by an operator to obtain the desired image quality on the screen. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to find the optimized parameter values far TGC and DR automatically. In TGC optimization, we determine the degree of attenuation compensation along the depth by dividing an image into vertical strips and reliably estimating the attenuation characteristic of ultrasound signals. For DR optimization, we define a novel cost function by properly using the characteristics of ultrasound images. We obtain experimental results by applying the proposed algorithm to a real ultrasound(US) imaging system. The results verify that the proposed algorithm automatically sets values of TGC and DR in real-time such that the subjective quality of the enhanced ultrasound images may be sufficiently high for efficient and accurate diagnosis.