• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2015.11a
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• pp.81-83
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• 2015

객관적 영상 화질 측정(Image Quality Assessment: IQA)방법은 영상 화질 최적화 문제해결을 목적으로 하는 영상 처리 및 컴퓨터 비전 분야에 매우 중요하게 사용된다. 이를 위해, 저복잡도, 고성능 및 좋은 수학적 특성(예를 들어, 척도성(metricability), 미분가능성(differentiability) 및 볼록 성질(convexity))을 모두 만족시키는 객관적 IQA 방법이 활발히 연구되어 왔다. 그러나, 위해 위에서 언급한 좋은 수학적 특성을 가지는 대부분의 객관적 IQA 방법들은 좋은 수학적 특성을 만족시키기 위해 상당한 예측성능의 감소를 초래했다. 본 논문은 위에서 언급한 좋은 수학적 특성을 모두 만족시키면서, 예측 성능이 향상된 새로운 IQA 방법을 제안한다. 인간 시각 체계의 감수영역은 광도 입력에 대해 공간 도메인에서 미분 형태의 응답을 가지므로, 제안 방법은 이러한 시각 체계 응답을 모방하여 기울기 연산자를 도입한다. 제안한 방법에서 도입한 기울기 연산자는 매우 단순하게 설계되어, 계산 복잡도가 매우 낮다. 광범위한 실험 결과, 제안하는 IQA 방법은 기존 수학적 특성이 좋은 IQA 방법들 대비 더 좋은 성능을 보이면서 계산 복잡도 또한 낮았다. 따라서 제안 IQA 방법은 다양한 영상 화질 최적화 문제에 매우 효과적으로 적용될 수 있다.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.81-88
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• 2004

In this paper, we propose a new objective quality assessment method considering the human visual perception characteristics. A subjective quality assessment is obtained by the response of the receptive field in the primary visual cortex and a human's eye can't focus on all of the visual range in a moment. Take advantage of two facts above, we apply Gabor wavelet transform which is well fit the receptive field in the cortex, to divided constant sized subblocks. Then a local distortion of the subblocks and a global distortion for the entire image are calculated in order. The proposed method has been evaluated using video test sequences provided by the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG). The experimental results show that good correlation with human perception is obtained using the proposed metric, which is what we called GPSNR.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.204-214
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• 2015

Depth map upsampling is an approach to increase the spatial resolution of depth maps obtained from a depth camera. Depth map quality is closely related to 3D perception of stereoscopic image, multi-view image and holography. In general, the performance of upsampled depth map is evaluated by PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio). On the other hand, time-consuming 3D subjective tests requiring human subjects are carried out for examining the 3D perception as well as visual fatigue for 3D contents. Therefore, if an objective metric is closely correlated with a subjective test, the latter can be replaced by the objective metric. For this, this paper proposes a best metric by investigating the relationship between diverse objective metrics and 3D subjective tests. Diverse reference and no-reference metrics are adopted to evaluate the performance of upsampled depth maps. The subjective test is performed based on DSCQS test. From the utilization and analysis of three kinds of correlations, we validated that SSIM and Edge-PSNR can replace the subjective test.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.31-43
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• 2014

A depth map is an important component for stereoscopic image generation. Since the depth map acquired from a depth camera has a low resolution, upsamling a low-resolution depth map to a high-resolution one has been studied past decades. Upsampling methods are evaluated by objective evaluation tools such as PSNR, Sharpness Degree, Blur Metric. As well, the subjective quality is compared using virtual views generated by DIBR (depth image based rendering). However, works on the analysis of the relation between depth map upsampling and stereoscopic images are relatively few. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between subjective evaluation of stereoscopic images and objective performance of upsampling methods using cross correlation and linear regression. Experimental results demonstrate that the correlation of edge PSNR and visual fatigue is the highest and the blur metric has lowest correlation. Further, from the linear regression, we found relative weights of objective measurements. Further we introduce a formulae that can estimate 3D performance of conventional or new upsampling methods.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.818-826
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• 2015

Recently, objective image quality assessment (IQA) methods that elaborately reflect the visual quality perception characteristics of human visual system (HVS) have actively been studied. Among those characteristics of HVS, luminance adaptation (LA) effect, indicating that HVS has different sensitivities depending on background luminance values to distortions, has widely been reflected into many existing IQA methods via Weber's law model. In this paper, we firstly reveal that the LA effect based on Weber's law model has inaccurately been reflected into the conventional IQA methods. To solve this problem, we firstly derive a new LA effect-based Local weight Function (LALF) that can elaborately reflect LA effect into IQA methods. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed LALF by applying LALF into SSIM (Structural SIMilarity) and PSNR methods. Experimental results show that the SSIM based on LALF yields remarkable performance improvement of 5% points compared to the original SSIM in terms of Spear rank order correlation coefficient between estimated visual quality values and measured subjective visual quality scores. Moreover, the PSNR (Peak to Signal Noise Ratio) based on LALF yields performance improvement of 2.5% points compared to the original PSNR.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.281-290
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• 2010

Cone-beam digital tomosynthesis (CBDT) has greatly been paid attention in the image-guided radiation therapy because of its attractive advantages such as low patient dose and less motion artifact. Image quality of tomograms is, however, dependent on the imaging conditions such as the scan angle (${\beta}_{scan}$) and the number of projection views. In this paper, we describe the principle of CBDT based on filtered-backprojection technique and investigate the optimization of imaging conditions. As a system performance, we have defined the figure-of-merit with a combination of signal difference-to-noise ratio, artifact spread function and floating-point operations which determine the computational load of image reconstruction procedures. From the measurements of disc phantom, which mimics an impulse signal and thus their analyses, it is concluded that the image quality of tomograms obtained from CBDT is improved as the scan angle is wider than 60 degrees with a larger step scan angle (${\Delta}{\beta}$). As a rule of thumb, the system performance is dependent on $\sqrt{{\Delta}{\beta}}{\times}{\beta}^{2.5}_{scan}$. If the exact weighting factors could be assigned to each image-quality metric, we would find the better quantitative imaging conditions.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.252-260
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• 2012

The reduction of radiation dose from x-ray is a main concern in computed tomography (CT) imaging due to the side-effect of the dose on human body. Recently, the various methods for dose reduction have been studied in CT and one of the method is a iterative reconstruction based on total variation (TV) minimization at few-views data. In this paper, we evaluated the image quality between total variation (TV) minimization algorithm and Feldkam-Davis-kress (FDK) algorithm in micro computed tomography (CT). To evaluate the effect of TV minimization algorithm, we produced a cylindrical phantom including contrast media, water, air inserts. We can acquire maximum 400 projection views per rotation of the x-ray tube and detector. 20, 50, 90, 180 projection data were chosen for evaluating the level of image restoration by TV minimization. The phantom and mouse image reconstructed with FDK algorithm at 400 projection data used as a reference image for comparing with TV minimization and FDK algorithm at few-views. Contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), Universal quality index (UQI) were used as a image evaluation metric. When projection data are not insufficient, our results show that the image quality of reconstructed with TV minimization is similar to reconstructed image with FDK at 400 view. In the cylindrical phantom study, the CNR of TV image was 5.86, FDK image was 5.65 and FDK-reference was 5.98 at 90-views. The CNR of TV image 0.21 higher than FDK image CNR at 90-views. UQI of TV image was 0.99 and FDK image was 0.81 at 90-views. where, the number of projection is 90, the UQI of TV image 0.18 higher than FDK image at 90-views. In the mouse study UQI of TV image was 0.91, FDK was 0.83 at 90-views. the UQI of TV image 0.08 higher than FDK image at 90-views. In cylindrical phantom image and mouse image study, TV minimization algorithm shows the best performance in artifact reduction and preserving edges at few view data. Therefore, TV minimization can potentially be expected to reduce patient dose in clinics.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.10
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• pp.108-117
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• 2015

If typical contrast enhancement algorithms for natural images are applied to X-ray images, they may cause artifacts such as overshooting or produce unnatural visual quality because they do not consider inherent characteristics of X-ray images. In order to overcome such problems, we propose a locally adaptive block-based contrast enhancement algorithm for X-ray images. After we derive a weighted cumulative distribution function for each block, we apply it to each block for contrast enhancement. Then, we obtain images that are removed from block effect by adopting block-based overlapping. In post-processing, we obtain the final image by emphasizing high frequency components. Experimental results show that the proposed block-based contrast enhancement algorithm provides at maximum 5-times higher visual quality than the exiting algorithm in terms of quantitative contrast metric.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.200-206
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• 2016

Images can be obtained by collecting rays from objects. The characteristics of electromagnetic wave propagation depend on the medium. In particular, in an underwater imaging system, the interface between air and water must be considered. Further, reflection and transmission coefficients can be found by using electromagnetic theory. Because of the fact that the values of these coefficients differ according to the media, the recorded light intensities will change. A color image sensor has three different color channels. Therefore, the reflection and transmission coefficients have to be calculated individually. Thereafter, by using these coefficients, we can compensate for the color information of underwater objects. In this paper, we present a method to compensate for the color information of underwater objects by using electromagnetic wave propagation theory. To prove our method, we conducted optical experiments and evaluated the quality of the compensated image by a metric known as mean square error.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.115-125
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• 2011

The smartphones which have been recently are embedded with high resolution quality camera, assisted GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope and various sensors including magnetometer sensor that could be directly used for measurement. This study aims to suggest the possible application of smartphone camera providing high resolution images in terms of photogrammetry by calibrating it and assessing its accuracy. First of all, prior to the accuracy assessment of smartphone camera, camera calibration was conducted to correct lens distortion of each camera and the accuracy of image coordinates and object coordinates calculated by bundle adjustment during this procedure was analyzed. Also regarding three-dimensional positioning, result analysis depending on considering lens distortion coefficients was conducted, and finally relative accuracy of smartphone camera on metric camera was assessed. The result showed that in terms of distortion correction of smartphone camera, also higher order symmetric radial lens distortion coefficients should be considered, and three dimensional position determined by smartphone images was a little difference from that by metric camera. Therefore it is expected that smartphone images have huge possibility to be used for photogrammetry.