• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.835-836
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• 2008

This paper presents a new method of segmenting characters in a car licence plate which is less influenced by illumination variation. It uses an anisotropic filter to reduce the lighting noise and a histogram specification scheme to obtain the binary image. Anisotropic smoothing filter process the input images, which are acquired under different lighting conditions, so that they may have similar image quality. The enhanced performance of the proposed algorithm has been proved by the experiment.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.61-73
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• 2012

This paper proposes a histogram specification based image enhancement method, which uses the brightness mean and variance of an image to maximize the entropy of the image. In our histogram specification step, the Gaussian distribution is used to fit the input histogram as well as produce the target histogram. Specifically, the input histogram is fitted with the Gaussian distribution whose mean and variance are equal to the brightness mean(${\mu}$) and variance(${\sigma}2$) of the input image, respectively; and the target Gaussian distribution also has the mean of the value ${\mu}$, but takes as the variance the value which is determined such that the output image has the maximum entropy. Experimental results show that compared to the existing methods, the proposed method preserves the mean brightness well and generates more natural looking images.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.5998-6016
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• 2017

In thin-film transistor liquid-crystal displays (TFT-LCDs), which are most commonly used in mobile devices, the backlight accounts for about 70% of the power consumption. Therefore, most low-power-related studies focus on realizing power savings through backlight dimming. Image compensation is performed to mitigate the visual distortion caused by the backlight dimming. Therefore, popular techniques include pixel compensation for brightness recovery and contrast enhancement, such as histogram equalization. However, existing pixel compensation techniques often have limitations with respect to blur owing to the pixel saturation phenomenon, or because contrast enhancement cannot adequately satisfy the human visual system (HVS). To overcome these, in this study, we propose a novel dimming technique to achieve both power saving and HVS-awareness by combining the pixel compensation and histogram specifications, which convert the original cumulative density function (CDF) by designing and using the desired CDF of an image. Because the process of obtaining the desired CDF is customized to consider image characteristics, histogram specification is found to achieve better HVS-awareness than histogram equalization. For the experiments, we employ the LIVE image database, and we use the structural similarity (SSIM) index to measure the degree of visual satisfaction. The experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves up to 15.9% increase in the SSIM index compared with existing dimming techniques that use pixel compensation and histogram equalization in the case of the same low-power ratio. Further, the results indicate that it achieves improved HVS-awareness and increased power saving concurrently compared with previous techniques.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2008.10b
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• pp.145-146
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• 2008

The appearance inspection of various electronic products and parts has been executed by the eyesight of human. But inspection by eyesight cannot bring about uniform inspection result. Because the appearance inspection result by eyesight of human is changed by condition of physical and spirit of the checker. So machine vision inspection system is currently used to many appearance inspection fields instead of the checker. However the inspection result of machine vision is changed by the illumination of workplace. Therefore we proposed histogram specification in this paper for machine vision inspection accuracy. As a result of histogram specification algorithm, we could increase the exactness of visual inspection and prevent system error from physical and spirit condition of human. More specifically, average inspection error rate was 7.5[%] in existing inspection method but we could see 0.6[%] error rate after applying the algorithm which is presented in this paper.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.764-771
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose a high-quality image acquisition algorithm using only a single image, which the high-quality image is normally referred as HDR ones. In order to acquire the HDR image, conventional methods need many images having different exposure values at the same scene and should delicately adjust the color values for a bit-expansion or an exposure fusion. Thus, they require considerable calculations and complex structures. Therefore, the proposed algorithm suggests a completely new approach using one image for the high-quality image acquisition by applying statistical difference and histogram manipulation, or histogram specification, techniques. The techniques could control the pixel's statistical distribution of the input image into the desired one through the local and the global modifications, respectively. As the result, the quality of the proposed algorithm is better than those of conventional methods implemented in commercial image editing softwares.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.44 no.5
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• pp.11-17
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• 2007

The appearance inspection of various electronic products and parts has been executed by the eyesight of human. But inspection by eyesight can't bring about uniform inspection result. Because the appearance inspection result by eyesight of human is changed by condition of physical and spirit of the checker. So machine vision inspection system is currently used to many appearance inspection fields instead of the checker. However the inspection result of machine vision is changed by the illumination of workplace. Therefore we have used a power-law transformation and histogram specification in this paper for improvement of vision inspection accuracy. As a result of these power-law transformation and histogram specification algorithm, we could increase the exactness of vision inspection and prevent system error from physical and spirit condition of human. Also this system has been developed only using PC, CCD Camera and Visual C++ for universal workplace.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.11
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• pp.1298-1306
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• 2016

Backlight has a major factor in power consumption of TFT-LCDs which are most popular in portable devices. There have been a lot of attempts to achieve power savings by backlight dimming. At the same time, the researches have shown image compensation due to decreased brightness of a displayed image. However, existing image compensation methods such as histogram equalization have some limits in completely satisfying the human visual system (HVS)-awareness. This paper proposes an enhanced dimming technique to obtain both power saving and HVS-awareness by combining pixel compensation and histogram specification for TFT-LCDs. This method executes a search algorithm and an automation algorithm employing simplified calculations for fast image processing. Experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved significant improvement in visual satisfaction per power saving over existing backlight dimming.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.1-10
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose the algorithm for the AR(Augmented Reality) system, which is robust to the brightness change of light. In the proposed method, the histogram specification is achieved using the sample histogram, obtained from the frames in which the target objects could be detected successful. And When the object key-points couldn't be detected by the displacement of camera positions, the positions of non-detected key-points ware estimated using the linear KF(Kalman Filter). When the proposed algorithm is applied in the AR systems, the object key-points can be detected three times as much as the existing others. In addition, to prove the more efficiency of the proposed algorithm, we implemented the AR game, and could know that the performance is the more advanced than the others. The proposed algorithm can be used for the AR environments, which high efficiency is required such as the AR game, or the implementation of AR systems which are robust to the change of lights, etc.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.87-94
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• 2007

Imbalances in focus, luminance and color between stereo Pairs could cause disparity vector estimation error and increment of transmission data. If the distribution of errors in residual image is large, it may influence to lowering of compression performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient balancing method between stereo pairs to reduce the effect. For this, we registrated stereo images using a FFT based method to consider the pixels in the occluded region, we eliminated the pixels of blocks which has large error of disparity vector estimation in balancing function estimation. The balancing function has estimated using histogram specification, local information of target image and residual image between stereo images. Experiments show that the proposed method is effective in error distribution, PSNR and disparity vector estimation. We expect that our method can be improving compression efficiency in stereo coding system.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.18B no.5
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• pp.265-270
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a method for intensity correction using binarization-based region segmentation in 3D stereoscopic images. In the proposed method, 3D stereoscopic right image is segmented using binarizarion. Small regions in the segmented image are eliminated. For each region in right image, a corresponding region in left image is decided through region matching using correlation coefficient. When region-based matching, in order to prevent overlap between regions, we remove a portion of the area closed to the region boundary using morphological filter. The intensity correction in left and right image can be performed through histogram specification between the corresponding regions. Simulation results show the proposed method has the smallest matching error than the conventional method when we generate the right image from the left image using block based motion compensation.