• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.9-16
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• 2018

Images with lower illumination from the light source or with dark regions due to shadows, etc., can improve subjective image quality by using retinex-based image enhancement schemes. The retinex theory is a method that recognizes the relative lightness of a scene, rather than recognizing the brightness of the scene. The way the human visual system recognizes a scene in a specific position can be in one of several methods: single-scale retinex, multi-scale retinex, and multi-scale retinex with color restoration (MSRCR). The proposed method is based on the MSRCR method, which includes a color restoration step, which consists of three phases. In the first phase, the existing MSRCR method is applied. In the second phase, the dynamic range of the MSRCR output is adjusted according to its histogram. In the last phase, the proposed method transforms the retinex output value into the display dynamic range using a logarithm transformation function considering human visual system characteristics. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm effectively increases the subjective image quality, not only in dark images but also in images including both bright and dark areas. Especially in a low lightness image, the proposed algorithm showed higher performance improvement than the conventional approaches.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.11
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• pp.1621-1629
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• 2010

This paper presents an improved fast MSRCR algorithm that MSRs are commonly adopted at tone mapping in color vision. Conventional MSRs consist of three SSRs, which use three Gaussian functions with different scales as those surround ones. This convolution processes require much computation load. Therefore, the proposed algorithm adopts a hierarchical discrete correlation which is equivalent to Gaussian function and the Retinex process is only applied to the luminance channel in order to get a fast processing. A simple color preservation scheme is applied to the Retinex output from the luminance channel in the proposed MSRCR algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm required less number of oprations and computation time about 1/9.5 and 1/3.5 times, respectively, than those of the simplest MSR and was equivalent to conventional MSRs.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.25 no.9
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• pp.1273-1283
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• 2022

This paper presents a locally adaptive HDR algorithm using the integral image and MSRCR for LDR images with inadequate exposure. There are two categories in controlling the dynamic range, which are global and local tone mappings. Since the global ones are relatively simple but have some limitations at considering regional characteristics, the local ones are often utilized and MSRCR is a representative method. MSRCR gives moderate results, but it requires lots of computations for multi-scale surround Gaussian functions and produces the Halo effect around the edges. Therefore, in order to resolve these main problems, the proposed algorithm remarkably reduces the computation of the surrounds due to the use of the integral image. And a set of variable-sized windows is adopted to decrease the Halo effect, according to the type of pixel's region. In addition, an offset controlling function is presented, which is mainly affected to the subjective image quality and based on the global input and the desired output means. As the results, the proposed algorithm no more use Gaussian functions and can reduce the computation amount and the Halo effect.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.25 no.10
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• pp.1395-1403
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• 2022

Lately, over 4K high definition and high dynamic range (HDR) display devices are popularized, various interpolation and HDR methods have been researched to expand the size and the dynamic range. Since most of the legacy low resolution (LR) images require both an interpolation and a HDR tone mapping methods, the two processes should be subsequently applied. Therefore, the proposed algorithm presents a HDR up-scaling algorithm using undecimated wavelet transform and Retinex method, which transfers a LR image of low dynamic range (LDR) into the high resolution (HR) with HDR. The proposed algorithm consists of an up-scaling scheme increasing the image size and a tone mapping scheme expanding the dynamic range. The up-scaling scheme uses the undecimated version of the simplest Haar wavelet analysis for the 8-directional interpolation and the change region is extracted during the analysis. This region information is utilized in controlling the surround functions' size of the proposed tone mapping using MSRCR, to enhance the pixels of around the edges that are dominant feature of the subjective image quality. As the results, the proposed algorithm can apply an up-scaling and tone mapping processes in accordance with the type of pixel.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.1481-1490
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• 2017

This paper presents an image quality enhancement algorithm for dark image acquired under poor lighting condition. Various retinex algorithms which are human perception-based image processing methods were proposed to solve this problem. Although MSR(Multi-Scale Retinex) among these algorithm works well under most lighting condition, it shows color degradation because their separate nonlinear processing of RGB color channels. To compensate for the loss of the color, MSRCR(Multi-Scale Retinex with Color Restoration) was proposed. However, it requires high computational load and has additional parameters that need to be adjusted according to input image. In order to overcome this problem, a new retinex algorithm based on MSR is proposed in this paper. The proposed method consists of V channel MSR, saturation correction, and separate contrast enhancement process. Experimental results show that the subjective and objective image quality of the proposed method better than those of the conventional methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.2 s.314
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• pp.116-125
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a illumination environment adaptive real-time surveillance system for security of important area such as military bases, prisons, and strategic infra structures. The proposed system recognizes movement of objects on the bright environments as well as in dark illumination. The procedure of proposed system may be summarized as follows. First, the system discriminates between bright and dark with input image distribution. Then, if the input image is dark, the system has a pre-processing. The Multi-scale Retinex Color Restoration(MSRCR) is processed to enhance the contrast of image captured in dark environments. Secondly, the enhanced input image is subtracted with the revised background image. And then, we take a morphology image processing to obtain objects correctly. Finally, each bounding box enclosing each objects are tracked. The center point of each bounding box obtained by the proposed algorithm provides more accurate tracking information. Experimental results show that the proposed system provides good performance even though an object moves very fast and the background is quite dark.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.7324-7330
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• 2014

Color distortion of the dark images acquired under a low-light-level environment with a weak light source can be cause of the performance decreation of various vision systems. Therefore, recovering the original color of the images is an important process for enhancing the performance of the system. For this, this study proposes a color restoration method using a dichromatic reflection model. This paper assumes that the dark images can be classified into two parts affected by specular or diffuse reflection. Two different color constancy methods were then applied to the images to remove the effects of each reflection and two images were created as a result. The resulting images produced a one color-corrected image by combining with different weights according to the position in the images. For the performance evaluation, this paper used a synthesized image, and considered the Euclidean distance and angular error as an evaluation factor. In addition, a performance comparison was performed with the existing various color constancy method to achieve the objectivity of evaluation. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can be a more suitable solution for color restoration than the existing method.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2011.01a
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• pp.37-38
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• 2011

본 논문은 상대적으로 대비도 차이가 크게 나타나는 역광 이미지에 대해서 Retinex 알고리즘을 적용하여 보정 했을 경우 발생하는 밝은 영역에서의 컬러 성분의 손실을 개선하기 위한 새로운 기법을 제안한다. 역광 이미지의 경우 밝은 영역과 어두운 영역에 대한 밝기 차이가 매우 크게 발생하기 때문에 Retinex 알고리즘을 이용하여 영상의 대비도를 향상시킬 경우 밝은 영역에서의 컬러 성분이 손실되는 현상이 발생한다. 이러한 손실을 보완하기 위해서 원본 영상의 밝은 영역에 해당하는 컬러 성분을 Retinex 알고리즘으로 보정된 영상에 추가해준다. Fuzzy c-means 군집화 알고리즘을 이용하여 원본 영상에서의 밝은 영역과 어두운 영역에 대하여 모든 화소의 소속 정도를 나타내는 퍼지 소속 함수를 구한다. 밝은 영역에 대해서의 컬러 성분은 원본 영상 값에 밝은 영역 퍼지 소속 함수를 적용하고, 어두운 영역에 대해서의 컬러 성분은 Retinex 복원 영상 값에 어두운 영역 퍼지 소속 함수를 이용한다. 제안하는 알고리즘의 성능 평가를 위해 역광 현상이 강하게 나타나는 자연영상들을 대상으로 적용하여 기존의 Retinex 알고리즘(MSRCR) 보다 우수한 성능을 가지고 있음을 보였다.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.851-863
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• 2012

Retinex algorithm enhances the contrast of image through visibility improvement. However, the conventional Retinex methods may produces color distortions due to error of hue representation and over-saturation since the methods work in RGB color space. In this paper, we propose a new Retinex algorithm with color correction, which improves contrast by using MSR(Multi-Scale Retinex) working in YCbCr color space and adaptively compensates the color saturation based on the maximum color difference table. Our algorithm maps the color difference signals to the correct gamut to prevent over-saturation phenomenon by considering the correlation between luminance and hue dependent saturation. Simulations results show that the proposed method gives better color improvement compared to the conventional methods.