• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
• /
• v.23 no.3
• /
• pp.595-607
• /
• 2010

This paper addresses the problem of reducing the speckle noise in SAR images by wavelet transformation, using a non-local means(NLM) filter originated for Gaussian noise removal. Log-transformed SAR image makes multiplicative speckle noise additive. Thus, non-local means filtering and wavelet thresholding are used to reduce the additive noise, followed by an exponential transformation. NLM filter is an image denoising method that replaces each pixel by a weighted average of all the similarly pixels in the image. But the NLM filter takes an acceptable amount of time to perform the process for all possible pairs of pixels. This paper, also proposes an alternative strategy that uses the t-test more efficiently to eliminate pixel pairs that are dissimilar. Extensive simulations showed that the proposed filter outperforms many existing filters terms of quantitative measures such as PSNR and DSSIM as well as qualitative judgments of image quality and the computational time required to restore images.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
• /
• v.5 no.1
• /
• pp.49-54
• /
• 2016

Regarding global and local factors of a set of features, a given single image or multiple images is a common approach in image processing. This paper introduces an application of an adaptive version of non-local filter whose original version searches non-local similarity for removing noise. Since most images involve texture partner in both foreground and background, extraction of signified regions with texture is a challenging task. Aiming to the detection of visual attention regions for images with texture, we present the contrast analysis of image patches located in a whole image but not nearby with assistance of the adaptive filter for estimation of non-local divergence. The method allows extraction of signified regions with texture of images of wild life. Experimental results for a benchmark demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to deal with the mentioned challenge.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
• /
• 2018.11a
• /
• pp.73-76
• /
• 2018

A Gaussian noise is caused by surrounding environment or channel interference when transmitting image. The noise reduces not only image quality degradation but also high-level image processing performance. The Non-Local Means (NLM) filter finds similarity in the neighboring sets of pixels to remove noise and assigns weights according to similarity. The weighted average is calculated based on the weight. The NLM filter method shows low noise cancellation performance and high complexity in the process of finding the similarity using weight allocation and neighbor set. In order to solve these problems, we propose an algorithm that shows an excellent noise reduction performance by using Summed Square Image (SSI) to reduce the complexity and applying the weighting function based on a cosine Gaussian kernel function. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
• /
• 2010.11a
• /
• pp.184-187
• /
• 2010

본 논문에서는 움직임 추정(Motion Estimation, ME), 색상 라벨링(Labeling) 그리고 Non-Local means 필터 등을 이용하여 2D 영상을 3D 입체 영상으로 변환하는 기법을 제안한다. 제안하는 기법에서는 프레임 간의 움직임 추정 방법을 사용하여 물체의 움직임 벡터를 추출하며 색상 라벨링 작업을 통해 세밀한 객체를 추출한다. 객체를 추출한 후 영상을 이동시켜서 우영상을 생성한다. 우 영상을 생성하는 과정에서 채워지지 않은 화소들이 발생하는데 전체 화소의 상관도를 고려하는 Non-local means 필터를 사용하여 이 부분을 처리한다. 생성된 우 영상과 원본 영상인 좌 영상으로 비월주사(interlace)하여 최종 3D 입체 영상을 생성한다.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.15 no.5
• /
• pp.1108-1118
• /
• 2019

Non-local means (NLM) algorithm is an effective and successful denoising method, but it is computationally heavy. To deal with this obstacle, we propose a novel NLM algorithm with fuzzy metric (FM-NLM) for image denoising in this paper. A new feature metric of visual features with fuzzy metric is utilized to measure the similarity between image pixels in the presence of Gaussian noise. Similarity measures of luminance and structure information are calculated using a fuzzy metric. A smooth kernel is constructed with the proposed fuzzy metric instead of the Gaussian weighted L2 norm kernel. The fuzzy metric and smooth kernel computationally simplify the NLM algorithm and avoid the filter parameters. Meanwhile, the proposed FM-NLM using visual structure preferably preserves the original undistorted image structures. The performance of the improved method is visually and quantitatively comparable with or better than that of the current state-of-the-art NLM-based denoising algorithms.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.33 no.1
• /
• pp.61-67
• /
• 2017

The detection of oil spills using radar image has been studied extensively. However, most of the proposed techniques have been focused on improving detection accuracy through the advancement of algorithms. In this study, research has been conducted to improve the accuracy of oil spill detection by improving the quality of radar images, which are used as input data to detect oil spills. Thresholding algorithms were used to measure the image improvement both before and after processing. The overall accuracy increased by approximately 16%, the producer accuracy increased by 40%, and the user accuracy increased by 1.5%. The kappa coefficient also increased significantly, from 0.48 to 0.92.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.153-163
• /
• 2015

This paper proposes a rain detection and removal algorithm that is robust against camera motion in video sequences. In detection part, the proposed algorithm initially detects possible rain streaks by using intensity properties and spatial properties. Then, the rain streak candidates are selected based on Gaussian distribution model. In removal part, a non-rain block matching algorithm is performed between adjacent frames to find similar blocks to the block that has rain pixels. If the similar blocks to the block are obtained, the rain region of the block is reconstructed by non-local means (NLM) filter using the similar neighbors. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the previous works in terms of subjective visual quality of de-rained video sequences.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.18 no.5
• /
• pp.518-523
• /
• 2017

This paper proposes a novel denoising method based on non-local(NL) means. The NL-means algorithm is effective for removing an additive Gaussian noise, but the denoising parameter should be controlled depending on the noise level for proper noise elimination. Therefore, the proposed method optimizes the denoising parameter according to the noise levels. The proposed method consists of two processes: off-line and on-line. In the off-line process, the relations between the noise level and the denoising parameter of the NL-means filter are analyzed. For a given noise level, the various denoising parameters are applied to the NL-means algorithm, and then the qualities of resulting images are quantified using a structural similarity index(SSIM). The parameter with the highest SSIM is chosen as the optimal denoising parameter for the given noise level. In the on-line process, we estimate the noise level for a given noisy image and select the optimal denoising parameter according to the estimated noise level. Finally, NL-means filtering is performed using the selected denoising parameter. As shown in the experimental results, the proposed method accurately estimated the noise level and effectively eliminated noise for various noise levels. The accuracy of noise estimation is 90.0% and the highest Peak Signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR), SSIM value.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
• /
• v.17 no.5
• /
• pp.679-684
• /
• 2023

Venous puncture is widely used to obtain blood samples for pathological examination. Because the invasive venipuncture method using a needle is repeatedly performed, the pain suffered by the patient increases, so our research team pre-developed a miniaturized near-infrared (NIR) imaging system in advance. To improve the image quality of the acquired NIR images, this study aims to model the non-local means (NLM) algorithm, which is well known to be efficient in noise reduction, and analyze its applicability in the system. The developed NIR imaging system is based on the principle that infrared rays pass through dichroic and long-pass filters and are detected by a CMOS sensor module. The proposed NLM algorithm is modeled based on the principle of replacing the pixel from which noise is to be removed with a value that reflects the distances between surrounding pixels. After acquiring an NIR image with a central wavelength of 850 nm, the NLM algorithm was applied to segment the final vein area through histogram equalization. As a result, the coefficient of variation of the NIR image of the vein using the NLM algorithm was 0.247 on average, which was an excellent result compared to conventional filtering methods. In addition, the dice similarity coefficient value of the NLM algorithm was improved by 62.91 and 9.40%, respectively, compared to the median filter and total variation methods. In conclusion, we demonstrated that the NLM algorithm can acquire accurate segmentation of veins acquired with a NIR imaging system.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.33 no.1
• /
• pp.89-95
• /
• 2017

Ship detection in synthetic aperture radar(SAR)imagery has long been an active research topic and has many applications. In this paper,we propose an efficient method for detecting ships from SAR imagery using filtering. This method exploits ship masking using a median filter that considers maximum ship sizes and detects ships from the reference image, to which a Non-Local means (NL-means) filter is applied for speckle de-noising and a differential image created from the difference between the reference image and the median filtered image. As the pixels of the ship in the SAR imagery have sufficiently higher values than the surrounding sea, the ship detection process is composed primarily of filtering based on this characteristic. The performance test for this method is validated using KOMPSAT-5 (Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite-5) SAR imagery. According to the accuracy assessment, the overall accuracy of the region that does not include land is 76.79%, and user accuracy is 71.31%. It is demonstrated that the proposed detection method is suitable to detect ships in SAR imagery and enables us to detect ships more easily and efficiently.