• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 1999.06a
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• pp.159-164
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• 1999

Homogeneous but distinct visual objects having low-contrast boundaries are usually merged in most of the segmentation algorithms. To alleviate this problem, an efficient image segmentation algorithm based on a bottom-up approach is proposed by using spatial domain information only. For initial image segmentation, we adopt an efficient marker extraction algorithm conforming to the human visual system. Then, two region-merging algorithms are successively applied so that homogeneous visual objects can be represented as simple as possible without destroying low-contrast real boundaries among them. The resultant segmentation describes homogeneous visual objects with few regions while preserving semantic object shapes well. Finally, a size-based region decision procedure may be applied to represent complex visual objects simpler, if their precise semantic contents are not necessary. Experimental results show that the proposed image segmentation algorithm represents homogeneous visual objects with a few regions and describes complex visual objects with a marginal number of regions with well-preserved semantic object shapes.

• Journal of Korea Spatial Information System Society
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• v.6 no.2 s.12
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• pp.3-13
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• 2004

The TPR-tree exploits bounding rectangles based on the function of time in order to index moving objects. As time passes on, each edge of a BR expands with the fastest velocity vector. Since the expansion of the BR results in a serious overlaps between neighboring nodes, the performance of range query is getting worse. In this paper, we propose schemes to reorganize bounding rectangles of nodes. When inserting a moving object, we exploit a forced merging scheme to merge two overlapped nodes and re-split it. When deleting a moving object, we used forced reinsertion schemes to reinsert other objects of a node into a tree. The forced reinsertion schemes are classified into a deleted node reinsertion scheme and an overlapped nodes reinsertion scheme. The overlapped nodes reinsertion scheme outperforms the forced merging scheme and the deleted node reinsertion scheme in all experiments.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.89-89
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• 2014

While the current consensus view holds that galaxy mergers are commonplace, it is sometimes speculated that Globular Clusters (GCs) may also have undergone merging events, possibly resulting in massive objects with a strong metallicity spread such as Omega Centauri. Galaxies are mostly far, unresolved systems whose mergers are most likely wet, resulting in observational as well as modeling difficulties, but GCs are resolved into stars that can be used as discrete dynamical tracers, and their mergers might have been dry, therefore easily simulated with an N-body code. It is however difficult to determine the observational parameters best suited to reveal a history of merging based on the positions and kinematics of GC stars, if evidence of merging is at all observable. To overcome this difficulty, we investigate the applicability of supervised and unsupervised machine learning to the automatic reconstruction of the dynamical history of a stellar system. In particular we test whether statistical clustering methods can classify simulated systems into monolithic versus merger products. We run direct N-body simulations of two identical King-model clusters undergoing a head-on collision resulting in a merged system, and other simulations of isolated King models with the same total number of particles as the merged system. After several relaxation times elapse, we extract a sample of snapshots of the sky-projected positions of particles from each simulation at different dynamical times, and we run a variety of clustering and classification algorithms to classify the snapshots into two subsets in a relevant feature space.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1999.11a
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• pp.577-580
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• 1999

Padding is a technique that enables applying conventional discrete cosine transform to encode boundary blocks of arbitrarily shaped objects by assigning imaginary values to the pixels that are not included in the object. Padding prevents the increase of high frequency DCT coefficients. However, in some boundary blocks, too many padded pixels are coded due to a small portion of object pixels. To reduce the number of padded pixels and to improve coding efficiency, we propose a block merging method for texture coding. The proposed mothed searches the shape information of boundary blocks and excludes the 4$\times$4 pixels of 8$\times$8 blocks if all the 4$\times$4 pixels are in the background region, and merges the remained 4$\times$4 pixels into new 8$\times$8 blocks. Experimental results show that our proposed method yields a rate-distortion gain about 0.5~1.6㏈ compared to conventional padding method, LPE

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.1116-1126
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• 2016

Image segmentation is widely used in the pre-processing stage of image analysis and, therefore, the accuracy of image segmentation is important for performance of an image-based analysis system. An efficient image segmentation method is proposed, including a filtering process for super-pixels, improved saliency map information, and a merge process. The proposed algorithm removes areas that are not equal or of small size based on comparison of the area of smoothed superpixels in order to maintain generation of a similar size super pixel area. In addition, application of a bilateral filter to an existing saliency map that represents human visual attention allows improvement of separation between objects and background. Finally, a segmented result is obtained based on the suggested merging process without any prior knowledge or information. Performance of the proposed algorithm is verified experimentally.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.313-314
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• 2006

Obtained disparity map from the stereo camera by using the several stereo matching algorithms carries lots of noise because of various causes. In our approach, mode filtering and noise elimination technique using the histogram and projection-based region merging methods are adopted for improving the quality of disparity map and image segmentation. The proposed algorithms are implemented in VHDL and the real-time experimentation shows the accurately divided objects.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.91-95
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• 2011

In this paper, we present an improved multi-scale gradient algorithm. The proposed algorithm works the effectively handling of both step and blurred edges. In the proposed algorithm, the image sharpening operator is sharpening the edges and contours of the objects. This operation gives an opportunity to get noise reduced image and step edged image. After that, multi-scale gradient operator works on noise reduced image in order to get a gradient image. The gradient image is segmented by watershed transform. The approach of region merging is used after watershed transform. The region merging is carried out according to the region area and region homogeneity. The region number of the proposed algorithm is 36% shorter than that of the existing algorithm because the proposed algorithm produces a few irrelevant regions. Moreover, the computational time of the proposed algorithm is relatively fast in comparison with the existing one.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.67 no.2
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• pp.293-300
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• 2018

We propose a moving object extraction and tracking method for improvement of animal identification and tracking technology. First, we propose a method of merging separated moving objects into a moving object by using FCM (Fuzzy C-Means) clustering algorithm to solve the problem of moving object loss caused by moving object extraction process. In addition, we propose a method of extracting data from a moving object and a method of counting moving objects to determine the number of clusters in order to satisfy the conditions for performing FCM clustering algorithm. Then, we propose a method to continuously track merged moving objects. In the proposed method, color histograms are extracted from feature information of each moving object, and the histograms are continuously accumulated so as not to react sensitively to noise or changes, and the average is obtained and stored. Thereafter, when a plurality of moving objects are overlapped and separated, the stored color histogram is compared with each other to correctly recognize each moving object. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed algorithms through some experiments.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.425-435
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a classification model by analyzing raw material images recorded using a color CCD camera to automatically classify good and defective agricultural products such as rice, coffee, and green tea, and raw materials. The current classifying agricultural products mainly depends on visual selection by skilled laborers. However, classification ability may drop owing to repeated labor for a long period of time. To resolve the problems of existing human dependant commercial products, we propose a vision based automatic raw material classification combining mean shift clustering and stepwise region merging algorithm. In this paper, the image is divided into N cluster regions by applying the mean-shift clustering algorithm to the foreground map image. Second, the representative regions among the N cluster regions are selected and stepwise region-merging method is applied to integrate similar cluster regions by comparing both color and positional proximity to neighboring regions. The merged raw material objects thereby are expressed in a 2D color distribution of RG, GB, and BR. Third, a threshold is used to detect good and defective products based on color distribution ellipse for merged material objects. From the results of carrying out an experiment with diverse raw material images using the proposed method, less artificial manipulation by the user is required compared to existing clustering and commercial methods, and classification accuracy on raw materials is improved.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.473-481
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose an image segmentation method preserving object's boundaries by using the number of quantized colors and merging regions using adaptive threshold values. First of all, the proposed method quantizes an original image by a vector quantization and the number of quantized colors is determined differently using PSNR each image. We obtain initial regions from the quantized image, merge initial regions in CIE Lab color space and RGB color space step by step and segment the image into semantic regions. In each merging step, we use color distance between adjacent regions as similarity-measure. Threshold values for region-merging are determined adaptively according to the global mean of the color difference between the original image and its split-regions and the mean of those variations. Also, if the segmented image of RGB color space doesn't split into semantic objects, we merge the image again in the CIE Lab color space as post-processing. Whether the post-processing is done is determined by using the color distance between initial regions of the image and the segmented image of RGB color space. Experiment results show that the proposed method splits an original image into main objects and boundaries of the segmented image are preserved. Also, the proposed method provides better results for objective measure than the conventional method.