• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.101-109
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• 2016

The images captured by digital still cameras or mobile phones are not always satisfactory because the devices have limited dynamic ranges compared with that of the real world. To cope with the problems, tone mapping function based methods and retinex theory based methods are studied. However, these methods generate a halo artifact or limited enhancement of global and local contrasts. The proposed method estimates illumination information used for image enhancement by optimizing a dynamic range of input image. The estimated illumination information has smoothness characteristic where the luminance is flat and does not have where the luminance changes to prevent the halo artifact. Additionally, the estimated illumination information and surrounding pixel values are considered when the tone mapping function is applied to overcome the limitations of the conventional tone mapping function approach. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional methods on objective and subjective criteria.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.270-275
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• 2018

Method for improving the image quality are divided into a tone mapping method and a retinex theory based method. Typical example of the image quality enhancement method using tone mapping method is one using image characteristics like histogram. In this paper, we propose a hardware design of real-time wide dynamic range algorithm based on tone mapping method for image quality enhancement. The proposed method divides the image into the luminance and chroma components and then improves the chroma region based on the variation of the luminance component. Adding to that, it is designed to be compatible with the existing 8-bit signal, using high quality image with 12-bit extended signal according to the desired flow. As a result of simulation, it is confirmed that the image quality is improved, and the hardware design is confirmed that the real-time operations is possible at the maximum frequency at 138.26MHz.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.948-953
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• 2015

Recently, the finger vein recognition based on NIR and CCD sensor camera is investigating the technology to identify a personal using by biometrics. The performance difference of finger vein recognition is generated according to methods that are to separate the vein and background from noises such as finger thickness, ambient light, skin temperature, etc. To improve these problems, in this study, we are proposing the methods for rotation, ROI extraction, and enhancement of vein image captured by NIR LED and CCD camera, and were evaluated performances of these methods. In results of the experiment, the accuracy of the proposed method for image rotation and ROI extraction was 99.8%. And the proposed filter bank method in vein enhancement has shown better performance than retinex algorithm. The proposed method for results of these experimentations will provide better recognition rate when applied to the preprocessing of finger vein recognition.