• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.845-846
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• 2008

Multi-scaled retinex algorithm is generally used to enhance the local contrast and remove the illuminant component. However, if the chromatic distribution of an original image is not uniform and dominated by a certain chromaticity, the chromaticity of resulting image depends on the dominant chromaticity of the original image, thereby inducing the color distortion. In this paper, a modified multi-scaled retinex method to reduce the influence of the dominant chromaticity in the image is proposed using a average chromaticity of original image and global illuminant chromaticity. In addition, to compensate saturation, the chroma value of the resulting image is enhanced based on that of the original image in the CIELAB space.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.1814-1828
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• 2021

Low-light image enhancement is a key technique to overcome the quality degradation of photos taken under scotopic vision illumination conditions. The degradation includes low brightness, low contrast, and outstanding noise, which would seriously affect the vision of the human eye recognition ability and subsequent image processing. In this paper, we propose an approach based on deep learning and Retinex theory to enhance the low-light image, which includes image decomposition, illumination prediction, image reconstruction, and image optimization. The first three parts can reconstruct the enhanced image that suffers from low-resolution. To reduce the noise of the enhanced image and improve the image quality, a super-resolution algorithm based on the Laplacian pyramid network is introduced to optimize the image. The Laplacian pyramid network can improve the resolution of the enhanced image through multiple feature extraction and deconvolution operations. Furthermore, a combination loss function is explored in the network training stage to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluations demonstrate the strength of the proposed method, the result is closer to the real-world scene in lightness, color, and details. Besides, experiments also demonstrate that the proposed method with the single low-light image can achieve the same effect as multi-exposure image fusion algorithm and no ghost is introduced.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.16A no.6
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• pp.473-480
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• 2009

This paper is to enhance a color image running in the PXA255 ARM processor based on embedded linux environments. Retinex is one of the representative algorithm for image enhancement in the previous research. However, retinex is not suitable the run on the embedded system because of its long processing time. So, we proposed the image enhancement algorithm for embedded system, with less quantity of operation and the effect equivalent to retinex. To achieve this goal, we propose and implement the image enhancement algorithm, which utilizes the image formation model and gamma correction to be effective in a back-light and dark image. The proposed algorithm converts the color space from RGB to HSV, and then V and S channels are processed. In order to optimize the proposed method in the PXA255 ARM processor, quantity of calculation is reduced. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated through qualitative method and quantitative method. The results show that brightness and contrast are improved with less quantity of operation.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.14 no.11
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• pp.1365-1372
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• 2011

This paper proposes a cognitive contrast enhancement algorithm based on the non-linear masking to advance low cognitive contrast in dark regions of images. In order to improve brightness in dark regions of an image, we propose a new contrast enhancement algorithm based on the non-linear masking using regional adaptive parameters of an image. For performance evaluation of the proposed method, chromaticity and saturation comparison as a quantitative assessment and z-score comparison as a qualitative assessment were executed between test images and their simulated images by SSR, MSR, a conventional non-linear masking and the proposed method, respectively. As a result, the proposed method showed low chromaticity and saturation difference and improved cognitive contrast for the three methods.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.58-61
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• 2000

In this paper, we describe an effective method to enhance the color night images with spatio-temporal multi-scale retinex focused to the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications such as in the single CCD based Electronic Toll Collection System (ETCS). The basic spatial retinex is known to provide color constancy while effectively removing local shades. However, it is relatively ineffective in night vision enhancement. Our proposed method, STMSR, exploits the iterative time averaging of image sequences to suppress the noise in consideration of the moving vehicles in image frame. In the STMSR method, the spatial term makes the dark images distinguishable and preserves the color information day and night while the temporal term reduces the noise effect for sharper and clearer reconstruction of the contents in each image frame. We show through representative simulations that incorporating both terms in the modeling produces the output sequential images visually more pleasing than the original dim images.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.851-863
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• 2012

Retinex algorithm enhances the contrast of image through visibility improvement. However, the conventional Retinex methods may produces color distortions due to error of hue representation and over-saturation since the methods work in RGB color space. In this paper, we propose a new Retinex algorithm with color correction, which improves contrast by using MSR(Multi-Scale Retinex) working in YCbCr color space and adaptively compensates the color saturation based on the maximum color difference table. Our algorithm maps the color difference signals to the correct gamut to prevent over-saturation phenomenon by considering the correlation between luminance and hue dependent saturation. Simulations results show that the proposed method gives better color improvement compared to the conventional methods.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.837-856
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• 2016

Underwater image enhancement has received considerable attention in last decades, due to the nature of poor visibility and low contrast of underwater images. In this paper, we propose a new automatic underwater image enhancement algorithm, which combines nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain enhancement techniques with the mechanism of the human visual system (HVS). We apply the multiscale retinex algorithm based on the HVS into NSCT domain in order to eliminate the non-uniform illumination, and adopt the threshold denoising technique to suppress underwater noise. Our proposed algorithm incorporates the luminance masking and contrast masking characteristics of the HVS into NSCT domain to yield the new HVS-based NSCT. Moreover, we define two nonlinear mapping functions. The first one is used to manipulate the HVS-based NSCT contrast coefficients to enhance the edges. The second one is a gain function which modifies the lowpass subband coefficients to adjust the global dynamic range. As a result, our algorithm can achieve contrast enhancement, image denoising and edge sharpening automatically and simultaneously. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed algorithm has better enhancement performance than state-of-the-art algorithms both in subjective evaluation and quantitative assessment. In addition, our algorithm can automatically achieve underwater image enhancement without any parameter tuning.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.6069-6091
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• 2017

Augmented Reality (AR) overlays virtual information on real world data, such as displaying useful information on videos/images of a scene. This paper presents an Enhanced AR (EAR) system that displays useful statistical players' information on captured images of a sports game. We focus on the situation where the input image is degraded by strong sunlight. Proposed EAR system consists of an image enhancement technique to improve the accuracy of subsequent player and face detection. The image enhancement is followed by player and face detection, face recognition, and players' statistics display. First, an algorithm based on multi-scale retinex is proposed for image enhancement. Then, to detect players' and faces', we use adaptive boosting and Haar features for feature extraction and classification. The player face recognition algorithm uses boosted linear discriminant analysis to select features and nearest neighbor classifier for classification. The system can be adjusted to work in different types of sports where the input is an image and the desired output is display of information nearby the recognized players. Simulations are carried out on 2096 different images that contain players in diverse conditions. Proposed EAR system demonstrates the great potential of computer vision based approaches to develop AR applications.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39A no.8
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• pp.459-466
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• 2014

Fading effect of old pictures and printings is shown up differently according to the ink property, temperature, humidity, illuminants, and so on. Faded image enhancement techniques based on illuminant estimation are proposed such as the gray world algorithm and white patch retinex methods. However, conventional simple operators are not suitable for enhancing faded images because partial fading effect is appeared differently. Thus, this paper presents a color enhancement algorithm based on integrating correction coefficients for faded images. First, the proposed method adopts local process by using multi-scale average mask. The coefficients for each multi-scale average mask are obtained to apply the gray world algorithm. Then, integrating the coefficients with weights is performed to calculate correction ratio for red and blue channels in the gray world assumption. Finally, the enhanced image is obtained by applying the integrated coefficients to the gray world algorithm. In the experimental results, the proposed method reproduces better colors for both wholly and partially faded images compared with the previous methods.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.5112-5129
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• 2019

Image enhancement is a challenging problem in the field of image processing, especially low-light color images enhancement. This paper proposed a robust and comprehensive enhancement method based several points. First, the idea of bright channel is introduced to estimate the illumination map which is used to attain the enhancing result with Retinex model, and the color constancy is keep as well. Second, in order eliminate the illumination offsets wrongly estimated, morphological closing operation is used to modify the initial estimating illumination. Furthermore, in order to avoid fabricating edges, enlarged noises and over-smoothed visual features appearing in enhancing result, a multi-scale closing operation is used. At last, in order to avoiding the haloes and artifacts presented in enhancing result caused by gradient information lost in previous step, guided filtering is introduced to deal with previous result with guided image is initial bright channel. The proposed method can get good illumination map, and attain very effective enhancing results, including dark area is enhanced with more visual features, color natural and constancy, avoiding artifacts and over-enhanced, and eliminating Incorrect light offsets.