• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.251-258
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• 2004

This paper proposes a method for estimating the illuminant chromaticity using the distributions of the camera responses obtained by a CCD camera in a real-world scene. Illuminant estimation using a highlight method is based on the geometric relation between a body and its surface reflection. In general, the pixels in a highlight region are affected by an illuminant geometric difference, camera quantization errors, and the non-uniformity of the CCD sensor. As such, this leads to inaccurate results if an illuminant is estimated using the pixels of a CCD camera without any preprocessing. Accordingly, to solve this problem the proposed method analyzes the distribution of the CCD camera responses and selects pixels using the Mahalanobis distance in highlight regions. The use of the Mahalanobis distance based on the camera responses enables the adaptive selection of valid pixels among the pixels distributed in the highlight regions. Lines are then determined based on the selected pixels with r-g chromaticity coordinates using a principal component analysis(PCA). Thereafter, the illuminant chromaticity is estimated based on the intersection points of the lines. Experimental results using the proposed method demonstrated a reduced estimation error compared with the conventional method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.92-98
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• 2017

Generally, image contains geometrical and radiometric errors. Census transform can solve the stereo mismatching problem caused by the radiometric distortion. Since the general census transform compares center of window pixel value with neighbor pixel value, it is hard to obtain an accurate matching result when the difference of pixel value is not large. To solve that problem, we propose a census transform method that applies different 4-step weight for each pixel value difference by applying an assistance window inside the window kernel. If the current pixel value is larger than the average of assistance window pixel value, a high weight value is given. Otherwise, a low weight value is assigned to perform a differential census transform. After generating an initial disparity map using a weighted census transform and input images, the gradient information is additionally used to model a cost function for generating a final disparity map. In order to find an optimal cost value, we use guided filtering. Since the filtering is performed using the input image and the disparity image, the object boundary region can be preserved. From the experimental results, we confirm that the performance of the proposed stereo matching method is improved compare to the conventional method.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.66 no.6
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• pp.935-941
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• 2017

This paper proposes a method for estimating the distance betweeen vehicles in a moving situation using the image ratio of the distance between the tail lamps of a front vehicle. The actual distance between the tail lamps of a front vehicle was transmitted by LED tail lamps using visible light communication. As the distance between the front vehicle and the rear vehicle changes, it calculates the ratio of the pixel width between the tail lamps of the front vehicle projected on the image. The calculated values are used to derive a distance-mapping function through non-linear regression technique. Then, the distance between vehicles in the moving situation is estimated based on this function.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.1675-1685
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• 2012

DVC (Distributed Video Coding) technique plays an essential role in providing low-complexity video encoder. But, in order to achieve the better rate-distortion performances, most DVC systems need feedback channel for parity bit control. This causes the DVC-based system to have high decoding latency and becomes as one of the most critical problems to overcome for a real implementation. In order to overcome this problem and to accelerate the commercialization of the DVC applications, this paper analyzes an effect of LDPCA frame size for adaptive LDPCA frame-based parity bit request estimations. First, this paper presents the LDPCA segmentation method in pixel-domain and explains the temporal-based bit request estimation method and the spatial-based bit request estimation method using the statistical characteristics between adjacent LDPCA frames. Through computer simulations, it is shown that the better performance and fast decoding is observed specially when the LDPCA frame size is 3168 in QCIF resolution.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.175-182
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• 2023

In general, the design of structures and its construction processes are fundamentally dependent on their foundation and supporting ground. Thus, it is imperative to understand the behavior of the soil under certain stress and drainage conditions. As it is well known that certain characteristics and behaviors of soils with fines are highly dependent on water content, it is critical to accurately measure and identify the status of the soils in terms of water contents. Liquid limit is one of the important soil index properties to define such characteristics. However, liquid limit measurement can be affected by the proficiency of the operator. On the other hand, dynamic properties of soils are also necessary in many different applications and current testing methods often require special equipment in the laboratory, which is often expensive and sensitive to test conditions. In order to address these concerns and advance the state of the art, this study explores a novel method to determine the liquid limit of cohesive soil by employing video-based vibration analysis. In this research, the modal characteristics of cohesive soil columns are extracted from videos by utilizing phase-based motion estimation. By utilizing the proposed method that analyzes the optical flow in every pixel of the series of frames that effectively represents the motion of corresponding points of the soil specimen, the vibration characteristics of the entire soil specimen could be assessed in a non-contact and non-destructive manner. The experimental investigation results compared with the liquid limit determined by the standard method verify that the proposed method reliably and straightforwardly identifies the liquid limit of clay. It is envisioned that the proposed approach could be applied to measuring liquid limit of soil in practical field, entertaining its simple implementation that only requires a digital camera or even a smartphone without the need for special equipment that may be subject to the proficiency of the operator.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.4C
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• pp.424-432
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• 2003

In this paper, an effective method of stereo image reconstruction through the regularized adaptive disparity estimation is proposed. Althougth the conventional adaptive disparity estimation method can sharply improve the PSNR of a reconstructed stereo image, but some problems of overlapping between the matching windows and disallocation of the matching windows can be occurred, because the matching window size changes adaptively in accordance with the magnitude of feature values. Accordingly, in thia paper, a new regularized adaptive disparity estimation technique is proposed. That is, by regularizing the estimated disparity vector with the neughboring disparity vectors, problems of the conventional adaptive disparity estimated scheme might be solved, and also the predicted stereo image can be more effectively reconstructed. From some experiments using the CCETT'S stereo image pairs of 'Man' and 'Claude', it is analyzed that the proposed disparity estimation scheme can improve PSNRs of the reconstructed images to 10.89dB, 6.13dB for 'Man' and 1.41dB, 0.81dB for 'Claude' by comparing with those of the conventional pixel-based and adaptive estimation method, respectively.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.259-265
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• 2012

Recently, many research works are focusing on DVC (Distributed Video Coding) system for low complexity encoder. Most DVC systems need feedback channel for parity bit control to achieve the good RD performances, however, this causes the system to have high decoding latency and is considered as one of the most critical problems for real implementation. In order to overcome this problem, this paper proposes an effective distributed video decoding method using adaptive LDPCA frame-based parity bit request estimation. The proposed method applies for the pixel-domain Wyner-Ziv system and exploits the statistical characteristics between adjacent LDPCA frames to estimate adaptively the parity bit request. Through computer simulations, it is shown that the proposed method achieves about 80% of latency reduction compared to the conventional no-estimation DVC system.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.54-61
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• 2023

With the development of IoT technologies and artificial intelligent, diverse digital image equipments are being used in industrial sites. Because image data can be easily damaged by noise while it's obtained with a camera or a sensor and the damaged image has a bad effect on the process of image processing, noise removal is being demanded as preprocessing. In this thesis, for the restoration of image damaged by the noise of random impulse, a switching filter algorithm based on noise estimation was suggested. With the proposed algorithm, noise estimation and error distraction were carried out according to the similarity of the pixel values in the local mask of the image, and a filter was chosen and switched depending on the ratio of noise existing in the local mask. Simulations were conducted to analyze the noise removal performance of the proposed algorithm, and as a result of magnified image and PSNR comparison, it showed superior performance compared to the existing method.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.65-78
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• 1992

When using a computer vision system for a measurement, the geometrically distorted input image usually restricts the site and size of the measuring window. A geometrically distorted image caused by the image sensing and processing hardware degrades the accuracy of the visual measurement and prohibits the arbitrary selection of the measuring scope. Therefore, an image calibration is inevitable to improve the measuring accuracy. A calibration process is usually done via four steps such as measurement, modeling, parameter estimation, and compensation. In this paper, the efficient error calibration technique of a geometrically distorted input image was developed using a neural network. After calibrating a unit pixel, the distorted image was compensated by training CMLAN(Cerebellar Model Linear Associator Network) without modeling the behavior of any system element. The input/output training pairs for the network was obtained by processing the image of the devised sampled pattern. The generalization property of the network successfully compensates the distortion errors of the untrained arbitrary pixel points on the image space. The error convergence of the trained network with respect to the network control parameters were also presented. The compensated image through the network was then post processed using a simple DDA(Digital Differential Analyzer) to avoid the pixel disconnectivity. The compensation effect was verified using known sized geometric primitives. A way to extract directly a real scaled geometric quantity of the object from the 8-directional chain coding was also devised and coded. Since the developed calibration algorithm does not require any knowledge of modeling system elements and estimating parameters, it can be applied simply to any image processing system. Furthermore, it efficiently enhances the measurement accuracy and allows the arbitrary sizing and locating of the measuring window. The applied and developed algorithms were coded as a menu driven way using MS-C language Ver. 6.0, PC VISION PLUS library functions, and VGA graphic functions.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.10B no.6
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• pp.657-664
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• 2003

Reliable tracking of moving humans is essential to motion estimation, video surveillance and human-computer interface. This paper presents a new approach to human motion tracking that combines appearance-based and model-based techniques. Monocular color video is processed at both pixel level and object level. At the pixel level, a Gaussian mixture model is used to train and classily individual pixel colors. At the object level, a 3D human body model projected on a 2D image plane is used to fit the image data. Our method does not use inverse kinematics due to the singularity problem. While many others use stochastic sampling for model-based motion tracking, our method is purely dependent on nonlinear programming. We convert the human motion tracking problem into a nonlinear programming problem. A cost function for parameter optimization is used to estimate the degree of the overlapping between the foreground input image silhouette and a projected 3D model body silhouette. The overlapping is computed using computational geometry by converting a set of pixels from the image domain to a polygon in the real projection plane domain. Our method is used to recognize various human motions. Motion tracking results from video sequences are very encouraging.