• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.12 no.1
• /
• pp.35-45
• /
• 2016

To resolve the problems of Poisson/impulse noise, blurriness, and sharpness in degraded X-ray images, a novel and efficient enhancement algorithm based on X-ray image fusion using a discrete wavelet transform is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm consists of two basics. First, it applies the techniques of boundary division to detect Poisson and impulse noise corrupted pixels and then uses the Wiener filter approach to restore those corrupted pixels. Second, it applies the sharpening technique to the same degraded X-ray image. Thus, it has two source X-ray images, which individually preserve the enhancement effects. The details and approximations of these sources X-ray images are fused via different fusion rules in the wavelet domain. The results of the experiment show that the proposed algorithm successfully combines the merits of the Wiener filter and sharpening and achieves a significant proficiency in the enhancement of degraded X-ray images exhibiting Poisson noise, blurriness, and edge details.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
• /
• 2008.06a
• /
• pp.893-894
• /
• 2008

In this paper, we propose a sharpening approach which is based on unsharp masking through the adaptive windowing. This adaptive windowing changes the window size of the low-pass filter which is used in unsharp mask for reducing the halo artifacts.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.29 no.2
• /
• pp.122-131
• /
• 2008

For B-mode ultrasound images, we propose an image enhancement algorithm based on a multi-resolution approach, which consists of edge enhancing and noise reducing procedures. Edge enhancement processing is applied sequentially to coarse-to-fine resolution images obtained from wavelet-transformed data. In each resolution, the structural features of each pixel are examined through eigen analysis. Then, if a pixel belongs to an edge region, we perform two-step filtering: that is, directional smoothing is conducted along the tangential direction of the edge to improve continuity and directional sharpening is conducted along the normal direction to enhance the contrast. In addition, speckle noise is alleviated by proper attenuation of the wavelet coefficients of the homogeneous regions at each band. This region-based speckle-reduction scheme is differentiated from other methods that are based on the magnitude statistics of the wavelet coefficients. The proposed algorithm enhances edges regardless of changes in the resolution of an image, and the algorithm efficiently reduces speckle noise without affecting the sharpness of the edge. Hence, compared with existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm considerably improves the subjective image quality without providing any noticeable artifacts.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
• /
• 2002.07a
• /
• pp.180-183
• /
• 2002

In this paper, we propose new unsharp masking technique based on the multiscale gradient planes. The unsharp masking technique is implemented as a high-pass filter and improves the sharpness of degraded images. However, the conventional unsharp masking enhances the noise component simultaneously. To reduce the noise influence, we introduce the edge information from the difference of the gradient values between two consecutive scales of the multiscale gradient. The multiscale gradient indicates the presence of image edges as the ratio between the gradients between two different scales by its multiscale nature. The noise reduction of the proposed method does not depend on the variance of images and noises. In experiment, we demonstrate enhancement results for blurred noisy images and compare with the conventional cubic unsharp masking technique.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.65-73
• /
• 2017

This paper proposes a method to improve the image quality by designing Unsharp Mask Filter (UMF) based on Retinex theory which controls the frequency pass characteristics adaptively. Conventional unsharp masking technique uses blurring image to emphasize sharpness of image. Unsharp Masking(UM) adjusts the original image and sigma to obtain a high frequency component to be emphasized by the difference between the blurred image and the high frequency component to the original image, thereby improving the contrast ratio of the image. In this paper, we design a Unsharp Mask Filter(UMF) that can process the contrast ratio improvement method of Unsharp Masking(UM) technique with one filtering. We adaptively process the contrast ratio improvement using Unsharp Mask Filter(UMF). We propose a method based on Retinex theory for adaptive processing. For adaptive filtering, we control the weights of Unsharp Mask Filter(UMF) based on the human visual system and output more effective results.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.53 no.11
• /
• pp.73-81
• /
• 2016

In general, infrared images have less sharpness and image details than visible images. So, the prior image upscaling methods are not effective in the infrared images. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes an algorithm which initially up-scales an input infrared (IR) image by using adaptive dynamic range encoding (ADRC)-based super-resolution (SR) method, and then fuses the result with the corresponding visible images. The proposed algorithm consists of a up-scaling phase and a fusion phase. First, an input IR image is up-scaled by the proposed ADRC-based SR algorithm. In the dictionary learning stage of this up-scaling phase, so-called 'pre-emphasis' processing is applied to training-purpose high-resolution images, hence better sharpness is achieved. In the following fusion phase, high-frequency information is extracted from the visible image corresponding to the IR image, and it is adaptively weighted according to the complexity of the IR image. Finally, a up-scaled IR image is obtained by adding the processed high-frequency information to the up-scaled IR image. The experimental results show than the proposed algorithm provides better results than the state-of-the-art SR, i.e., anchored neighborhood regression (A+) algorithm. For example, in terms of just noticeable blur (JNB), the proposed algorithm shows higher value by 0.2184 than the A+. Also, the proposed algorithm outperforms the previous works even in terms of subjective visual quality.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.52 no.10
• /
• pp.97-107
• /
• 2015

The initial X-ray images obtained from a digital X-ray machine have a wide data range and uneven brightness level than normal images. In particular, in Chest X-ray images, it is necessary to improve naturally all of the parts such as ribs, spine, tissue, etc. These X-ray images can not be improved enough from conventional image quality enhancement algorithms because their characteristics are different from ordinary images'. This paper proposes to eliminate unnecessary background from an input image and expand the histogram range of the image. Then, we adjust the weight per frequency band of the image for improvement of contrast and sharpness. Finally, jointly taking the advantages of global contrast enhancement and local contrast enhancement methods we obtain an improved X-ray image suitable for effective diagnosis in comparison with the existing methods. Experimental results show quantitatively that the proposed algorithm provides better X-ray images in terms of the discrete entropy and saturation than the previous works.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
• /
• v.45 no.2
• /
• pp.18-25
• /
• 2008

The current display systems including TVs are going digital and large-sized, and high visual quality of those systems becomes a very important selling point in the current display system market. Thus, various researches have been carried out for enhancing the visual quality of digital display systems. One of the important digital image(or video) enhancement techniques is sharpness enhancement, and it is generally based on a transient improvement technique that reduces the edge transition time. However, this technique often generates overshoot and undershoot, which cause undesirable pixel-level changes around the transient improved edge. In this paper, we propose a new nonlinear filter-based adaptive shoot elimination method for effectively suppressing the overshoot and undershoot that occur in the transient improvement, so that we can obtain visually sharper and clearer digital images(or videos). The proposed method uses two orthogonal directional min/max nonlinear filters with an adaptive shoot elimination scheme in order to effectively suppress the visually sensitive overshoot and undershoot. Experimental results show that the proposed method suppresses the overshoot and undershoot almost perfectly while maintaining the effect of the transient improvement. The applications of the proposed method include digital TVs, digital monitors, digital cameras/camcoders, portable media players(PMP), etc.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2004.08a
• /
• pp.101-106
• /
• 2004

In this paper, a blood vessel in an angiographic image, which plays an importance role in the diagnose diseases including in the eyes, brain and heart, is enhanced by using a directed diffusion technique. A fundamental component of the angiographic analysis is vessel segmentation that the proposed method provides a preprocessing of the image into a form suitable for human analysis, or more importantly, for machine analysis such the segmentation. Vessel enhancement is a challenging problem due to the complex nature of vascular trees and to imaging imperfections. Some parts of the inherent imperfections in angiography are the intensity inhomogeneity between the larger and smaller vessels, and another imperfection is the leakage of contrast agent into the background tissue that provides to low contrast between vessels and tissue. In the proposed scheme, the directed diffusion solves the problem by formulating a local geometric structure, which consists of direction and scale of the blood vessels. The diffusion process uses the local structure to enhance by a diffusivity tensor. The proposed algorithm can be applied to maintain sharpness and coherence-smooth the intra-regions into homogeneity better than traditional diffusion methods, which are Gaussian regulation and coherence enhancing diffusion.

• Journal of the Korean Graphic Arts Communication Society
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.133-146
• /
• 1996

Eastman Kodak Co. has announced the concept of photo CD System in September, 1990 With Photo CD System technology, Kodak Co. Furnishes a convinent way to view, use and store photographic images. The heart of this system is a format provides progressively higher levels of image quality to meet the demands of NTSC, PAL and HDTV video displays as well as hard copy output. Also, image professionals are instrested in the capability of Photo CD, such as a way to store image at low cost in a high-resolution digital format that can be played back on different computer platforms. Many editors wish to use Photo CD images in the printing and publishing industry. However, Photo CD images were not processed detail enhancement and some others to use in the lithographic offset printing. Therefore, in this paper discribes a method to improve the sharpness of Photo CD images.