• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.479-489
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• 2014

This paper presents a model-based image steganography method based on Watson's visual model. Model-based steganography assumes a model for cover image statistics. This approach, however, has some weaknesses, including perceptual detectability. We propose to use Watson's visual model to improve perceptual undetectability of model-based steganography. The proposed method prevents visually perceptible changes during embedding. First, the maximum acceptable change in each discrete cosine transform coefficient is extracted based on Watson's visual model. Then, a model is fitted to a low-precision histogram of such coefficients and the message bits are encoded to this model. Finally, the encoded message bits are embedded in those coefficients whose maximum possible changes are visually imperceptible. Experimental results show that changes resulting from the proposed method are perceptually undetectable, whereas model-based steganography retains perceptually detectable changes. This perceptual undetectability is achieved while the perceptual quality - based on the structural similarity measure - and the security - based on two steganalysis methods - do not show any significant changes.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.9
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• pp.3823-3840
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• 2020

Recently, auto-encoder has emerged as the most popular method in convolutional neural network (CNN) based image compression and has achieved impressive performance. In the traditional auto-encoder based image compression model, the encoder simply sends the features of last layer to the decoder, which cannot allocate bits over different spatial regions in an efficient way. Besides, these methods do not fully exploit the contextual information under different receptive fields for better reconstruction performance. In this paper, to solve these issues, a novel auto-encoder model is designed for image compression, which can effectively transmit the hierarchical features of the encoder to the decoder. Specifically, we first propose an adaptive bit-allocation strategy, which can adaptively select an importance channel. Then, we conduct the multiply operation on the generated importance mask and the features of the last layer in our proposed encoder to achieve efficient bit allocation. Moreover, we present an additional novel perceptual loss function for more accurate image details. Extensive experiments demonstrated that the proposed model can achieve significant superiority compared with JPEG and JPEG2000 both in both subjective and objective quality. Besides, our model shows better performance than the state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN)-based image compression methods in terms of PSNR.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.822-832
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• 1994

DSC-HDTV image compression algorithm removes spatial, temporal, and amplitude redundancies of an image by using transform coding, motion-compensated predictive coding, and adaptive quantization, respectively. In this paper, leak processing method which is used to recover image quality quickly from scene change and transmission error and adaptive quantization using perceptual weighting factor obtained by HVS are proposed. Perceptual weighting factor is calculated by contrast sensitivity, spatio-temporal masking and frequency sensitivity. Adaptive quantization uses the perceptual weighting factor and global distortion level from buffer history state. Redundant bits according to adaptation of HVS are used for the next image coding. In the case of scene change, DFD using motion compensated predictive coding has high value, large bit rate and unstabilized buffer states since reconstructed image has large quantization noise. Thus, leak factor is set to 0 for scene change frame and leak factor to 15/16 for next frame, and global distortion level is calculated by using standard deviation. Experimental results show that image quality of the proposed method is recovered after several frames and then buffer status is stabilized.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.8 no.10
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• pp.403-410
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• 2019

Image de-snowing aims at eliminating the negative influence by snow particles and improving scene understanding in images. In this paper, a perceptual generative adversarial network based a single image snow removal method is proposed. The residual U-Net is designed as a generator to generate the snow free image. In order to handle various sizes of snow particles, the inception module with different filter kernels is adopted to extract multiple resolution features of the input snow image. Except the adversarial loss, the perceptual loss and total variation loss are employed to improve the quality of the resulted image. Experimental results indicate that our method can obtain excellent performance both on synthetic and realistic snow images in terms of visual observation and commonly used visual quality indices.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2014.11a
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• pp.248-251
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• 2014

We develop the signal processing method for implementing the human perceptual variant on frequency and space. The human visual perceptual sensitivity varies as frequency components and the human perceivable resolution diminishes as the distances further from the eye-focused point. For realizing the frequency sensitivity, we developed the signal direction adaptive multiband energy scaling method to weight the frequency components. The low-pass filtering is designed on the developed energy scaling method for diminishing perceivable resolutions as the deviated distance from the eye-focused point. The developed method not only enhances the frequency components of image signals at the eye-focused region but also smoothes non-perceivable detailed image signals at non-focused regions. The proposed method is verified by the subjective and objective evaluations that it can improve human perceptual visual quality.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.42 no.10
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• pp.1294-1302
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• 2015

A lot of image quality assessment metrics that can precisely reflect the human visual system (HVS) have previously been researched. The Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) index is a remarkable HVS-aware metric that utilizes structural information, since the HVS is sensitive to the overall structure of an image. However, SSIM fails to deal with color difference in terms of the HVS. In order to solve this problem, the Structural and Hue SIMilarity (SHSIM) index has been selected with the Hue, Saturation, Intensity (HSI) model as a color space, but it cannot reflect the HVS-aware color difference between two color images. In this paper, we propose a new image quality assessment method for a color image by using a CIE Lab color space. In addition, by using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, we also propose an optimization system for applying optimal metric according to the types of distortion. To evaluate the proposed index, a LIVE database, which is the most well-known in the area of image quality assessment, is employed and four criteria are used. Experimental results show that the proposed index is more consistent with the other methods.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.26 no.9
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• pp.1410-1419
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• 1989

In this paper, we present a new synthetic high coding method which gives high image compression ratio. Given an image, only its low-pass component is transmitted by DCT coding` the high-pass component is not transmitted but synthesized using edge sharpening on the reconstructed low-pass image at the receiver. For the DCT coding which is used to encode the low-pass image, we used an improved version of Cox's variance estimator. Also, introduced are new image quality measures called GSNR and EPR which emphasize perceptual aspects of image quality. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed synthetic high coding is better in various quality measures than that of Cox's adaptive transform coding. Also, it yields acceptable image quality with neither apparent block effect nor visible granular noise even at high compression ratio of about 30:1.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.2938-2956
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• 2020

Objective image quality assessment (IQA) models have been developed by effective features to imitate the characteristics of human visual system (HVS). Actually, HVS is extremely sensitive to color degradation and complex texture changes. In this paper, we firstly reveal that many existing full reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) methods can hardly measure the image quality with contrast and masking texture changes. To solve this problem, considering texture masking effect, we proposed a novel FR-IQA method, called Texture and Color Quality Index (TCQI). The proposed method considers both in the masking effect texture and color visual perceptual threshold, which adopts three kinds of features to reflect masking texture, color difference and structural information. Furthermore, random forest (RF) is used to address the drawbacks of existing pooling technologies. Compared with other traditional learning-based tools (support vector regression and neural network), RF can achieve the better prediction performance. Experiments conducted on five large-scale databases demonstrate that our approach is highly consistent with subjective perception, outperforms twelve the state-of-the-art IQA models in terms of prediction accuracy and keeps a moderate computational complexity. The cross database validation also validates our approach achieves the ability to maintain high robustness.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.447-452
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• 1988

This paper proposes a hybrid image coding in order to improve the coding performance by combining the BTC with the DPCM. And utilizing the human perceptual characteristics, a new objective image quality evaluation method has been proposed to obtain an excellent result in good agreement with the subjective quality evaluation. A hyb-1 method consisting of the DPCM and the AMBTC has retained a good picture quality at the bit rate of 1.5 bits/pel. A hyb-3 method combining the EBTC-3 with the DPCM has scarcely degraded the picture quality compared with the original image at the bit rate of 2.1 bits/pel. A newly proposed mehtod of picture quality evaluation accumulating a blocky noise at the edge block and an impulsive noise at the flat block selectively has been coincident with the subjective evaluation of quality.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2009.01a
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• pp.316-320
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• 2009

In this paper, a reference-free perceptual quality metric is proposed for image assessment. It measures the amount of overall blockiness and blurring in the image. And edge-oriented artifacts, such as ringing, mosaic and staircase noise are also considered. In order to give a single quality score, the individual artifact scores are adaptively combined according to the difference between the edge-oriented artifacts and other artifacts. The quality score obtained by the proposed algorithm shows strong correlation with the MOS values by VQEG.