• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.16 no.11
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• pp.1250-1260
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• 2013

The contrast enhancement techniques based on Laplacian pyramid image fusion have a benefit that they can faithfully describe the image information because they combine the multiple resource images by selecting the desired pixel in each image. However, they also have some problem that the output image may contain noise, because the methods evaluate the visual information on the basis of each pixel. In this paper, an improved contrast enhancement method, which effectively suppresses the noise, using image fusion is proposed. The proposed method combines the resource images by making Laplacian pyramids generated from weight maps, which are produced by measuring the difference between the block-based local well exposedness and local homogeneity for each resource image. We showed the proposed method could produce less noisy images compared to the conventional techniques in the test for various images.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.41-51
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• 2014

This paper describes a method to estimate the noise power using the minimum statistics approach, which was originally proposed for audio processing. The proposed minimum statistics-based method separates a noisy image into multiple frequency bands using the three-level discrete wavelet transform. By assuming that the output of the high-pass filter contains both signal detail and noise, the proposed algorithm extracts the region of pure noise from the high frequency band using an appropriate threshold. The region of pure noise, which is free from the signal detail part and the DC component, is well suited for minimum statistics condition, where the noise power can be extracted easily. The proposed algorithm reduces the computational load significantly through the use of a simple processing architecture without iteration with an estimation accuracy greater than 90% for strong noise at 0 to 40dB SNR of the input image. Furthermore, the well restored image can be obtained using the estimated noise power information in parametric image restoration algorithms, such as the classical parametric Wiener or ForWaRD image restoration filters. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can estimate the noise power accurately, and is particularly suitable for fast, low-cost image restoration or enhancement applications.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.49-57
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• 2012

This paper presents a fast multiple-image-based deblurring method that decreases the computation loads in the image deblurring, enhancing the sharpness of the textures or edges of the restored images. First, two blurred images with some blurring artifacts and one noisy image including severe noises are consecutively captured under a relatively long and short exposures, respectively. To improve the processing speeds, the captured multiple images are downsampled at the ratio of two, and then a way of estimating the point spread function(PSF) based on the image or edge patches extracted from the whole images, is introduced. The method enables to effectively reduce the computation time taken in the PSF prediction. Next, the texture-enhanced image deblurring method of supplementing the ability of the texture representation degraded by the downsampling of the input images, is developed and then applied. Finally, to get the same image size as the original input images, an upsampling method of utilizing the sharp edges of the captured noisy image is applied. By using the proposed method, the processing times taken in the image deblurring, which is the main obstacle of its application to the digital cameras, can be shortened, while recovering the fine details of the textures or edge components.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.8-22
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• 1978

Recently developed Computed Topography (CT) reconstruction algorithms are reviewed in a more generalized sense and a few reconstruction examples are given for illustration. The construction of an image function from the physically measured projections of some object is Discussed with reference to the least squares optimum filters, originally derived to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio in communications theory. The computerifed image processing associated with topography is generalized so as to include 3 distinct parts: the construction of an image from the projection, the restoration of a blurred, noisy image, degraded by a known space-invariant impulse response, and the further enhancement of the image, e.g. by edge sharpening. In conjunction with given versions of the popular convolution algorithm, n6t 19 be confused with filtering by a 2-diminsional convolution, we consider the conditions under which a concurrent construction, restoration, and enhancement are possible. Extensive bibliographical limits are given in the references.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.61-67
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• 2017

Low-dose X-ray fluoroscopic image sequences to avoid radiation exposure risk are contaminated by quantum noise. To restore these noisy sequences, we propose a 3D nonlocal means (NLM) filter based on stochastic distancesed can be applied to the denoising of X-ray fluoroscopic image sequences. The stochastic distance is obtained within motion-compensated noise filtering support to remove the Poisson noise. In this paper, motion-adaptive weight which reflected the frame similarity is proposed to restore the noisy sequences without motion artifact. Experimental results including comparisons with conventional algorithms for real X-ray fluoroscopic image sequences show the proposed algorithm has a good performance in both visual and quantitative criteria.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.2 no.5
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• pp.347-352
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• 2013

In impulse noise filtering techniques window size play an important role. Usually, an appropriate window is determined according to the noise density. A small window may not be able to suppress noise properly whereas a large window may remove edges and fine image details. Moreover, the value of the central pixel is estimated by considering all pixels within the window. In this work, contrary to the previous approaches, we propose an iterative impulse noise removal scheme that emphasizes on noise-free pixels within a small neighborhood. The iterative process continues until all noisy pixels are replaced with the estimated pixels. In order to estimate the optimal value for a noisy pixel, a genetic programming (GP) based estimator is evolved that takes few noise-free pixels as input. The estimator is constituent of noise-free pixels, arithmetic operators and random constants. Experimental results show that theproposed scheme is capable of removing impulse noise effectively while preserving the fine image details. Especially, our approach has shown effectiveness against high impulse noise density.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.553-563
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• 1996

Detecting edges is one of issues with essentialimprotance in the area of image analysis. An edge in an image is a boundary or contour at which a significant change occurs in image intensity. Edge detection has been studied in many addlications such as imagesegmentation, robot vision, and image compression. In this paper, we propose an automatic threshold selection scheme for edge detection and show its application to noise elimination. The scheme suggested here applied statistical properties of the noise estimated from a noisy image to threshold selection. Since a selected threshold value in the scheme depends on not the characgreistic of an orginal image but the statistical feature of added noise, we can remove ad-hoc manners used for selecting the threshold value as well as decide the value theoretically. Furthermore, that shceme can reduce the number of edge pixels either generated or lost by noise. an application of the scheme to noise elimination is shown here. Noise in the input image can be eliminated with considering the direction of each edge pixedl on the edge map obtained by applying the threshold selection scheme proposed in this paper. Achieving significantly improved results in terms of SNR as well as subjective quality, we can claim that the suggested method works well.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2010.06c
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• pp.62-65
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• 2010

Image annotations allow users to access a large image database with textual queries. But since the surrounding text of Web images is generally noisy. an efficient image annotation and retrieval system is highly desired. which requires effective image search techniques. Data mining techniques can be adopted to de-noise and figure out salient terms or phrases from the search results. Clustering algorithms make it possible to represent visual features of images with finite symbols. Annotationbased image search engines can obtains thousands of images for a given query; but their results also consist of visually noise. In this paper. we present a new algorithm Double-Circles that allows a user to remove noise results and characterize more precise representative annotations. We demonstrate our approach on images collected from Flickr image search. Experiments conducted on real Web images show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.719-722
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• 2019

Gamma-ray images generally suffer from a lot of noise because of low photon detection in the gamma camera system. The purpose of this study is to improve the image quality in gamma-ray images using a gamma camera system with a fast nonlocal means (FNLM) noise reduction algorithm with an acceleration function. The designed FNLM algorithm is based on local region considerations, including the Euclidean distance in the gamma-ray image and use of the encoded information. To evaluate the noise characteristics, the normalized noise power spectrum (NNPS), contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and coefficient of variation (COV) were used. According to the NNPS result, the lowest values can be obtained using the FNLM noise reduction algorithm. In addition, when the conventional methods and the FNLM noise reduction algorithm were compared, the average CNR and COV using the proposed algorithm were approximately 2.23 and 7.95 times better than those of the noisy image, respectively. In particular, the image-processing time of the FNLM noise reduction algorithm can achieve the fastest time compared with conventional noise reduction methods. The results of the image qualities related to noise characteristics demonstrated the superiority of the proposed FNLM noise reduction algorithm in a gamma camera system.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1993.10b
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• pp.54-59
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• 1993

This paper presents a method of estimating 3-D surface geometrical features that are necessary for 3-D object recognition and image interpretation. The features, such as surface needle maps and curvatures, are computed from range or intensity images. In general, the range and intensity images are prone to noises, and hence the features computed by differentiation calculi on such a noisy image are hardly applicable to industrial recognition tasks. In our approach, we try to obtain a more accurate estimate of the features by using a least-squares minimization procedure subject to local curvature consistency constraints. The algorithm is robust with respect to noises and is completely independent of the viewpoint at which the image is taken. The performance of the ajgoritlim is evaluated using both synthetic data and real intensity images.