• Proceedings of the Optical Society of Korea Conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.260-261
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• 2002

For Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy measurements, the fiber tip is glued on the side of one of the tuning fork prongs vertically to its extended direction. Higher Q-factor is attainable in this geometry than in the arrangement with the fiber tip parallel to the prong. A simple mechanical design is applied to hold the fiber tip above the gluing point. The overall tuning fork-fiber tip assembly gives another advantage of the flexible Q-factor enhancement. With this treatment, Q-factor higher than 3000 is easily achievable. As an operating instance, a grating is scanned for its one dimensional topographical image.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.2337-2342
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose the novel approach to enhance the visual quality of the digital image with adaptively sharpening and removing the noise. Image enhancement is performed in two ways. The pixels in the high dynamics area are sharpened by the adaptive unsharp mask with the parameter, which is derived using the statistical information of the image. On the other hand, the proposed algorithm do not perform the sharpening process in the uniform area that may cause the undesired artifact due to noise amplification, rather it performs smoothing to suppress the noise in this area. The decision, which process will be applied at the pixel, is also controlled by the statistics of the pixel dynamics. The proposed algorithm enhances the visual quality almost automatically by sharpening and smoothing at the same time with less parameter selection.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.368-379
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• 2010

As high-definition video is broadly used in various system such as broadcast system and digital camcorder the proper method in order to improve the quality of high-definition video is needed. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to improve color and contrast of high-definition video. In order to apply the image enhancement method to high-definition video, scale-down video of high-definition video is used and the parameter for image enhancement method is computed from small size video. To enhance the color of high-definition video, we apply color constancy method. First, we separate the video into several scenes by cut detection method. Then, we apply color constancy to each scene with same parameter. To improve the contrast of high-definition video, we use union of original image and histogram equalized image, and weight is calculated based on sorting of histogram bins. Finally, the performance of proposed method is demonstrated in experiment section.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.142-151
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• 1996

The digital video cassette recorder(DVCR) is considered as next generation VCR due to its performance breakthrough in various aspects, such as digital recording and various digital image processing techniques. The purpose of our study is to understand the standardized specifications of the DVCR system, evaluate the performance of the system, and improve the quality of the reconstructed DVCR image. More specifically, in order to enhance the DVCR Image we consider a series of discrete cosine transform(DCT), quantization, inverse DCT, and Inverse quantization as a degradation process of the Imaging system, and propose a fast adaptive image restoration algorithm for reducing blocking artifacts.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1999.11a
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• pp.224-227
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• 1999

This paper presents a design of the real-time preprocessor for CMOS image sensor suitable to the digital camera applications. CMOS image sensor offers some advantages in on-chip integration, system power reduction, and low cost. However, it has a lower-quality image than CCDs. We describe an image enhancement algorithm, which includes color interpolation, color correction, gamma correction, sharpening, and automatic exposure control, to compensate for this disadvantage, and present its efficient hardware architecture to implement on the real-time processor. The presented real-time preprocessor was designed using VHDL, and it contains about 19.2K logic gates. We also implement our system on FPGA chips in order to provide the real-time adjustment and it was successfully tested.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.11-19
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• 2023

To remove unnecessary background from tooth X-ray images and enhance the sharpness of tooth and gum images, image processing techniques including contrast adjustment and histogram equalization are used. The introduction of two methods for detecting the boundary of the tooth and gum region and separating the tooth and gum from the background. In both cases, the background of the tooth X-ray images could be removed as a result, improving the quality of the images. The proposed method improves MTF (Modulation Transfer Function), an image performance indicator, as a result of measuring MTF. The original image's spatial frequency ranged from 4.73 to 11.40 lp/mm at the 10% response, whereas the proposed image's spatial frequency ranged from 10.90 to 11.85 lp/mm, giving uniformly enhanced results. In contrast, tooth and gums could not be completely separated from the background using Apple's Lift subject from background function.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.525-532
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• 2018

Recently, due to the advancements of sensor network technologies and camera technologies, there are increasing needs to effectively monitor the environment in a region that is difficult to access by using the visual sensor network that combines these two technologies. Since the image captured by the visual sensor reflects the natural phenomenon as it is, the quality of the image may deteriorate depending on the weather or time. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to improve the contrast of images using the characteristics of images obtained from visual sensors. In the proposed method, we first set the region of interest and then analyzes the change of the color value of the region of interest according to the brightness value of the image. The contrast of an image is improved by using the high contrast image of the same object and the analysis information. It is shown by experimental results that the proposed method improves the contrast of an image by restoring the color components of the low contrast image simply and accurately.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.313-321
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• 2005

Digital halftoning is a process to produce a binary image so that the original image and its binary counterpart appear similar when observed from a distance. Among digital halftoning methods, error diffusion is a procedure for generating high quality bilevel images from continuous-tone images but blurs the edge information in the bilevel images. To solve this problem, we propose the improved error diffusion using local spatial information of the original images. Based on the fact that the human vision perceives not a pixel but local mean of input image, we compute edge enhancement information(EEI) by appling the ratio of a pixel and its adjacent pixels to local mean. The weights applied to local means is computed using the ratio of local activity measure(LAM) to the difference between input pixels of 3$\times$3 blocks and theirs mean. LAM is the measure of luminance changes in local regions and is obtained by adding the square of the difference between input pixels of 3$\times$3 blocks and theirs mean. We add the value to a input pixel of quantizer to enhance edge. The performance of the proposed method is compared with conventional methods by measuring the edge correlation. The halftone images by using the proposed method show better quality due to the enhanced edge. And the detailed edge is preserved in the halftone images by using the proposed method. Also the proposed method improves the quality of halftone images because unpleasant patterns for human visual system are reduced.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.11
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• pp.55-65
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• 2015

Contrast enhancement methods for a single image applied to videos may cause flickering artifacts because these methods do not consider continuity of videos. On the other hands, methods considering the continuity of videos can reduce flickering artifacts but it may cause unnecessary fade-in/out artifacts when the intensity of videos changes abruptly. In this paper, we propose a robust method of video contrast enhancement for sudden illumination changes. The proposed method enhances each frame by Fast Gray-Level Grouping(FGLG) and considers the continuity of videos by an exponential smoothing filter. The proposed method calculates the smoothing factor of an exponential smoothing filter using a sigmoid function and applies to each frame to reduce unnecessary fade-in/out effects. In the experiment, 6 measurements are used for the performance analysis of the proposed method and traditional methods. Through the experiment. it has been shown that the proposed method demonstrates the best quantitative performance of MSSIM and Flickering score and show the adaptive enhancement under sudden illumination change through the visual quality comparison.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.131-138
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• 2021

Objective: Iterative reconstruction degrades image quality. Thus, further advances in image reconstruction are necessary to overcome some limitations of this technique in low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scan of the chest. Deep-learning image reconstruction (DLIR) is a new method used to reduce dose while maintaining image quality. The purposes of this study was to evaluate image quality and noise of LDCT scan images reconstructed with DLIR and compare with those of images reconstructed with the adaptive statistical iterative reconstruction-Veo at a level of 30% (ASiR-V 30%). Materials and Methods: This retrospective study included 58 patients who underwent LDCT scan for lung cancer screening. Datasets were reconstructed with ASiR-V 30% and DLIR at medium and high levels (DLIR-M and DLIR-H, respectively). The objective image signal and noise, which represented mean attenuation value and standard deviation in Hounsfield units for the lungs, mediastinum, liver, and background air, and subjective image contrast, image noise, and conspicuity of structures were evaluated. The differences between CT scan images subjected to ASiR-V 30%, DLIR-M, and DLIR-H were evaluated. Results: Based on the objective analysis, the image signals did not significantly differ among ASiR-V 30%, DLIR-M, and DLIR-H (p = 0.949, 0.737, 0.366, and 0.358 in the lungs, mediastinum, liver, and background air, respectively). However, the noise was significantly lower in DLIR-M and DLIR-H than in ASiR-V 30% (all p < 0.001). DLIR had higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) than ASiR-V 30% (p = 0.027, < 0.001, and < 0.001 in the SNR of the lungs, mediastinum, and liver, respectively; all p < 0.001 in the CNR). According to the subjective analysis, DLIR had higher image contrast and lower image noise than ASiR-V 30% (all p < 0.001). DLIR was superior to ASiR-V 30% in identifying the pulmonary arteries and veins, trachea and bronchi, lymph nodes, and pleura and pericardium (all p < 0.001). Conclusion: DLIR significantly reduced the image noise in chest LDCT scan images compared with ASiR-V 30% while maintaining superior image quality.