• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.9-17
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• 2012

Recently, a new image appearance model, named iCAM06, was developed for High-Dynamic-Range (HDR) image rendering. The dynamic range of a HDR image needs to be mapped on the range of output devices, which is called the tone reproduction or tone mapping. The iCAM06, the representative HDR rendering algorithm also uses the tone compression using a S-curve mapping function for image reproduction on the dynamic range of output devices. However the iCAM06 occurs white point shift during its tone compression process. Therefore, we propose a compensation method for white point shift problem using the corrected channel gain function. Experiment results show that the proposed method has better performance than the iCAM06.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.205-208
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• 2022

Multi-exposure high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction, the task of reconstructing an HDR image from multiple low dynamic range (LDR) images in a dynamic scene, often produces ghosting artifacts caused by camera motion and moving objects and also cannot deal with washed-out regions due to over or under-exposures. While there has been many deep-learning-based methods with motion estimation to alleviate these problems, they still have limitations for severely moving scenes. They also require large parameter counts, especially in the case of state-of-the-art methods that employ attention modules. To address these issues, we propose a frequency domain approach based on the idea that the transform domain coefficients inherently involve the global information from whole image pixels to cope with large motions. Specifically we adopt Residual Fast Fourier Transform (RFFT) blocks, which allows for global interactions of pixels. Moreover, we also employ Depthwise Overparametrized convolution (DO-conv) blocks, a convolution in which each input channel is convolved with its own 2D kernel, for faster convergence and performance gains. We call this LFFNet (Lightweight Frequency Fusion Network), and experiments on the benchmarks show reduced ghosting artifacts and improved performance up to 0.6dB tonemapped PSNR compared to recent state-of-the-art methods. Our architecture also requires fewer parameters and converges faster in training.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.851-852
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a tone mapping method using Non-linear Dynamic Range Normalization (NDRN) for High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. HDR images are not suitable for commercial display devices because dynamic range of HDR images do not match with one of Low Dynamic Range (LDR) display devices. To reproduce a tone of HDR images for LDR displays, tone mapping methods have been proposed such as local and global tone mapping. We introduce NDRN to locate mean of HDR images at the center of LDR. NDRN preserves the details for highlight and shadow. By suppressing the significant luminance change in tone mapping, naturalness of original image can be also preserved. The experimental results show that the proposed method preserves details and naturalness of original images.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.829-830
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• 2008

In modern days, many of the images are captured by using various devices, such as PDA, digital camera, or cell phone camera. Because all these devise have a limited dynamic range, images captured in real world scenes with high dynamic ranges usually exhibit poor visibility and low contrast, which may make important image features lost or hard to tell by human viewers. In this paper, the efficient color image enhancement method is presented. Experimental result show that the proposed method yields better performance of color enhancement over the previous work for test color images.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.85-90
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• 2017

A wide dynamic range (WDR) CMOS image sensor (CIS) was developed with a specialized readout architecture for realizing high-sensitivity (HS) and low-sensitivity (LS) reading modes. The proposed pixel is basically a three-transistor (3T) active pixel sensor (APS) structure with an additional transistor. In the developed WDR CIS, only one mode between the HS mode for relatively weak light intensity and the LS mode for the strong light intensity is activated by an external controlling signal, and then the selected signal is read through each column-parallel readout circuit. The LS mode is implemented with the column capacitors and a feedback structure for adjusting column capacitor size. In particular, the feedback circuit makes it possible to change the column node capacitance automatically by using the incident light intensity. As a result, the proposed CIS achieved a wide dynamic range of 94 dB by synthesizing output signals from both modes. The prototype CIS is implemented with $0.18-{\mu}m$ 1-poly 6-metal (1P6M) standard CMOS technology, and the number of effective pixels is 176 (H) ${\times}$ 144 (V).

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.1027-1038
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• 2015

For last several decades, the color correction methods have been proposed for HDR(high dynamic range) images. However, color distortion problems take place after correcting the colors such as halos, dominant color as well known. Accordingly, this article presents a novel approach in which the method consists of tone-mapping method and cone response function. In the proposed method, the tone mapping method is used to improve the contrast in the given HDR image based on chromatic and achromatic based on the CIEXYZ tristimulus value, expressed in c/m². The cone response function is used to deal with mismatch between corrected image and displayed image as well as to estimate various human visual effects based on the CMCAT2000 color appearance model. The experimental results show that the proposed method yields better performance of color correction over the conventional method in subjective and quantitative quality, and color reproduction.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.1055-1065
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• 2009

High-dynamic-range (HDR) rendering technology changes the range from the broad dynamic range (up to 9 log units) of a luminance, in a real-world scene, to the 8-bit dynamic range which is the common output of a display's dynamic range. One of the techniques, iCAM06 has a superior capacity for making HDR images. iCAM06 is capable of making color appearance predictions of HDR images based on CIECAM02 and incorporating spatial process models in the human visual system (HVS) for contrast enhancement. However there are several problems in the iCAM06, including obscure user controllable factors to be decided. These factors have a serious effect on the output image but users get into difficulty in that they can't find an adequate solution on how to adjust. So a suggested model gives a quantitative formulation for user controllable factors of iCAM06 to find suitable values which corresponds with different viewing conditions, and improves subjective visuality of displayed images for varying illuminations.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.270-275
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• 2018

Method for improving the image quality are divided into a tone mapping method and a retinex theory based method. Typical example of the image quality enhancement method using tone mapping method is one using image characteristics like histogram. In this paper, we propose a hardware design of real-time wide dynamic range algorithm based on tone mapping method for image quality enhancement. The proposed method divides the image into the luminance and chroma components and then improves the chroma region based on the variation of the luminance component. Adding to that, it is designed to be compatible with the existing 8-bit signal, using high quality image with 12-bit extended signal according to the desired flow. As a result of simulation, it is confirmed that the image quality is improved, and the hardware design is confirmed that the real-time operations is possible at the maximum frequency at 138.26MHz.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.217-226
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• 2019

In this paper, we propose a filtering method that can improve the results of inverse tone-mapping using guided image filter. Inverse tone-mapping techniques have been proposed that convert LDR images to HDR. Recently, many algorithms have been studied to convert single LDR images into HDR images using CNN. Among them, there exists an algorithm for restoring pixel information using CNN which learned to restore saturated region. The algorithm does not suppress the noise in the non-saturation region and cannot restore the detail in the saturated region. The proposed algorithm suppresses the noise in the non-saturated region and restores the detail of the saturated region using a WGIF in the input image, and then applies it to the CNN to improve the quality of the final image. The proposed algorithm shows a higher quantitative image quality index than the existing algorithms when the HDR quantitative image quality index was measured.