• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.1365-1372
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• 2011

This paper proposes a cognitive contrast enhancement algorithm based on the non-linear masking to advance low cognitive contrast in dark regions of images. In order to improve brightness in dark regions of an image, we propose a new contrast enhancement algorithm based on the non-linear masking using regional adaptive parameters of an image. For performance evaluation of the proposed method, chromaticity and saturation comparison as a quantitative assessment and z-score comparison as a qualitative assessment were executed between test images and their simulated images by SSR, MSR, a conventional non-linear masking and the proposed method, respectively. As a result, the proposed method showed low chromaticity and saturation difference and improved cognitive contrast for the three methods.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.6069-6091
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• 2017

Augmented Reality (AR) overlays virtual information on real world data, such as displaying useful information on videos/images of a scene. This paper presents an Enhanced AR (EAR) system that displays useful statistical players' information on captured images of a sports game. We focus on the situation where the input image is degraded by strong sunlight. Proposed EAR system consists of an image enhancement technique to improve the accuracy of subsequent player and face detection. The image enhancement is followed by player and face detection, face recognition, and players' statistics display. First, an algorithm based on multi-scale retinex is proposed for image enhancement. Then, to detect players' and faces', we use adaptive boosting and Haar features for feature extraction and classification. The player face recognition algorithm uses boosted linear discriminant analysis to select features and nearest neighbor classifier for classification. The system can be adjusted to work in different types of sports where the input is an image and the desired output is display of information nearby the recognized players. Simulations are carried out on 2096 different images that contain players in diverse conditions. Proposed EAR system demonstrates the great potential of computer vision based approaches to develop AR applications.

• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.5112-5129
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• 2019

Image enhancement is a challenging problem in the field of image processing, especially low-light color images enhancement. This paper proposed a robust and comprehensive enhancement method based several points. First, the idea of bright channel is introduced to estimate the illumination map which is used to attain the enhancing result with Retinex model, and the color constancy is keep as well. Second, in order eliminate the illumination offsets wrongly estimated, morphological closing operation is used to modify the initial estimating illumination. Furthermore, in order to avoid fabricating edges, enlarged noises and over-smoothed visual features appearing in enhancing result, a multi-scale closing operation is used. At last, in order to avoiding the haloes and artifacts presented in enhancing result caused by gradient information lost in previous step, guided filtering is introduced to deal with previous result with guided image is initial bright channel. The proposed method can get good illumination map, and attain very effective enhancing results, including dark area is enhanced with more visual features, color natural and constancy, avoiding artifacts and over-enhanced, and eliminating Incorrect light offsets.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.467-472
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• 2005

The principal objective of enhancement methods is to process an image so that the output image is more suitable than the original image lot a specific application. Images taken in the night can be low-contrast images because of poor environments. In this paper, we compared the performance of Image Contrast Enhancement Technique Using Clustering Algorithm(ICECA) with those of color adjustment methods such as Histogram Equalization(HE), Brightness Preserving Bi-Histogram Equalization(BBHE), and the Multi-Scale Refiner(MSR). We compared these methods by applying the image enhancement methods to a set of diverse images.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.71-79
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• 2011

The objective of the imaging pipeline is to transform the original scene into a display image that appear similar, Generally, gamma adjustment or histogram-based method is modified to improve the contrast and detail. However, this is insufficient as the intensity and the chromaticity of illumination vary with geometric position. Thus, MSR (Multi-Scale Retinex) has been proposed. the MSR is based on a channel-independent logarithm, and it is dependent on the scale of the Gaussian filter, which varies according to input image. Therefore, after correcting the color, image quality degradations, such as halo, graying-out, and dominated color, may occur. Accordingly, this paper presents a novel color correction method using a modified image formation model in which the image is divided into three components such as global illumination, local illumination, and reflectance. The global illumination is obtained through Gaussian filtering of the original image, and the local illumination is estimated by using JND-based adaptive filter. Thereafter, the reflectance is estimated by dividing the original image by the estimated global and the local illumination to remove the influence of the illumination effects. The output image is obtained based on sRGB color representation. The experiment results show that the proposed method yields better performance of color correction over the conventional methods.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.297-298
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose a real-time surveillance system for security of important area such as military bases, prisons, and strategic infra structures. The proposed system recognizes the movement of objects in dark environments. First, the Multi-scale retinex (MSR) is processed to enhance the contrast of image captured in dark environments. Then, the enhanced input image is subtracted with the background image. 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.5095-5111
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• 2019

A multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system is developed to solve the manhole cover detection problem for the infrastructure maintenance in the suburbs of big city. The visible light sensor is employed to collect the ground image data and a series of image processing and machine learning methods are used to detect the manhole cover. First, the image enhancement technique is employed to improve the imaging effect of visible light camera. An imaging environment perception method is used to increase the computation robustness: the blind Image Quality Evaluation Metrics (IQEMs) are used to percept the imaging environment and select the images which have a high imaging definition for the following computation. Because of its excellent processing effect the adaptive Multiple Scale Retinex (MSR) is used to enhance the imaging quality. Second, the Single Shot multi-box Detector (SSD) method is utilized to identify the manhole cover for its stable processing effect. Third, the spatial coordinate of manhole cover is also estimated from the ground image. The practical applications have verified the outdoor environment adaptability of proposed algorithm and the target detection correctness of proposed system. The detection accuracy can reach 99% and the positioning accuracy is about 0.7 meters.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.9
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• pp.104-112
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• 2012

Recently, the HDR imaging technique that mimics human eye is incorporated with LCD/LED display devices to deal with mismatch between the real world scene and the displayed image. However, HDR image has a veiling glare limit as well as a scale of the local contrast problem. In order to overcome these problems, several color correction methods, CSR(center/surround Retinex), MSR (Multi-Scale Retinex), tone-mapping method, iCAM06 and so on, are proposed. However, these methods have a dominated color throughout the entire resulting image after performing color correction. Accordingly, this paper presents a new color correction method using dynamic cone response function. The proposed color correction method consists of tone-mapping and dynamic cone response. The tone-mapping is obtained by using a linear interpolation between chromatic and achromatic. Thereafter, the resulting image is processed through the dynamic cone response function, which estimates the dynamic responses of human visual system as well as deals with mismatch between the real scene image and the rendered image. The experiment results show that the proposed method yields better performance of color correction over the conventional methods.