• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.9-16
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• 2018

Images with lower illumination from the light source or with dark regions due to shadows, etc., can improve subjective image quality by using retinex-based image enhancement schemes. The retinex theory is a method that recognizes the relative lightness of a scene, rather than recognizing the brightness of the scene. The way the human visual system recognizes a scene in a specific position can be in one of several methods: single-scale retinex, multi-scale retinex, and multi-scale retinex with color restoration (MSRCR). The proposed method is based on the MSRCR method, which includes a color restoration step, which consists of three phases. In the first phase, the existing MSRCR method is applied. In the second phase, the dynamic range of the MSRCR output is adjusted according to its histogram. In the last phase, the proposed method transforms the retinex output value into the display dynamic range using a logarithm transformation function considering human visual system characteristics. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm effectively increases the subjective image quality, not only in dark images but also in images including both bright and dark areas. Especially in a low lightness image, the proposed algorithm showed higher performance improvement than the conventional approaches.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2011.06c
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• pp.417-420
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• 2011

로봇이 능동적으로 행동하기 위해서는 외부 신호를 받아서 처리해야 되는데 여러 가지 센서 중에서도 영상처리가 중요해지고 있다. 하지만 영상처리를 사용하였을 경우는 예측할 수 없는 외부환경으로부터 영향을 받을 수 있다. 예를 들면 조명이 일정한 내부 환경에서는 인식이 가능하나 외부환경에서는 불가능한 경우가 있다. 그러므로 로봇산업이 발전에 중요한 축을 담당하고 있는 영상처리에 분야 중에서 논문에서는 조명이 변하는 상황을 설정해보고 그 상황을 토대로 기존의 알고리즘인 [2][3] Single-scale Retinex. [4][5] Multi-scale Retinex와 인식률을 비교해보고 Single-scale Retinex을 기반으로 단순히 Multi- scale Retinex처럼 가중치를 같이 두는 것이 아니라 상황에 따라 가중치를 다르게 주는 알고리즘 'Adaptive Two Scale Relinex Algorilhm'을 소개하겠다. 더불어 앞으로 나아가야 될 방향에 대해서도 언급하겠다.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.99-107
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• 2019

Retinex-based image enhancement is a technique that utilizes the property that the human visual characteristics are sensitive to the difference from the surrounding pixel value rather than the pixel value itself. These Retinex-based algorithms show different characteristics of the improved image depending on the applied color space or gamma correction. In this paper, we set eight different experimental conditions according to the application of color space and gamma correction, and analyze the objective and subjective performance of each Retinex based image enhancement algorithm and apply it to the implementation of Retinex based algorithm. In the case of gamma correction, quantitative low entropy images and low contrast images are obtained. The application of Retinex technique in HSI color space rather than RGB color space is found to be high in overall subjective image quality as well as maintaining color.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.11
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• pp.936-941
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• 2006

To apply object recognition techniques to real environment, illumination compensation method should be developed. As effective illumination compensation model, we focused our attention on Retinex model and illumination-Reflectance model, implemented them, and experimented on their performance. We implemented Retinex model with Single Scale Retinex, Multi-Scale Retinex, and Retinex Neural Network and Multi-Scale Retinex Neural Network, neural network model of Retinex model. Also, we implemented illumination-Reflectance model with reflectance image calculation by calculating an illumination image by low frequency filtering in frequency domain of Discrete Cosine Transform and Wavelet Transform, and Gaussian blurring. We compare their illumination compensation performance to facial images under nine illumination directions. We also compare their performance after post processing using Principal Component Analysis(PCA). As a result, illumination Reflectance model showed better performance and their overall performance was improved when illumination compensated images were post processed by PCA.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.11
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• pp.1621-1629
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• 2010

This paper presents an improved fast MSRCR algorithm that MSRs are commonly adopted at tone mapping in color vision. Conventional MSRs consist of three SSRs, which use three Gaussian functions with different scales as those surround ones. This convolution processes require much computation load. Therefore, the proposed algorithm adopts a hierarchical discrete correlation which is equivalent to Gaussian function and the Retinex process is only applied to the luminance channel in order to get a fast processing. A simple color preservation scheme is applied to the Retinex output from the luminance channel in the proposed MSRCR algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm required less number of oprations and computation time about 1/9.5 and 1/3.5 times, respectively, than those of the simplest MSR and was equivalent to conventional MSRs.

• 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 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.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.16B no.5
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• pp.385-394
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• 2009

Face tracking and recognition are difficult problems because the face is a non-rigid object. The main reasons for the failure to track and recognize the faces are the changes of a face pose and environmental illumination. To solve these problems, we propose a nonlinear manifold framework for the face pose and the face illumination normalization processing. Specifically, to track and recognize a face on the video that has various pose variations, we approximate a face pose density to single Gaussian density by PCA(Principle Component Analysis) using images sampled from training video sequences and then construct the GMM(Gaussian Mixture Model) for each person. To solve the illumination problem for the face tracking and recognition, we decompose the face images into the reflectance and the illuminance using the SSR(Single Scale Retinex) model. To obtain the normalized reflectance, the reflectance is rescaled by histogram equalization on the defined range. We newly approximate the illuminance by the trained manifold since the illuminance has almost variations by illumination. By combining these two features into our manifold framework, we derived the efficient face tracking and recognition results on indoor and outdoor video. To improve the video based tracking results, we update the weights of each face pose density at each frame by the tracking result at the previous frame using EM algorithm. Our experimental results show that our method is more efficient than other methods.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.5095-5111
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• 2019

A multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system is developed to solve the manhole cover detection problem for the infrastructure maintenance in the suburbs of big city. The visible light sensor is employed to collect the ground image data and a series of image processing and machine learning methods are used to detect the manhole cover. First, the image enhancement technique is employed to improve the imaging effect of visible light camera. An imaging environment perception method is used to increase the computation robustness: the blind Image Quality Evaluation Metrics (IQEMs) are used to percept the imaging environment and select the images which have a high imaging definition for the following computation. Because of its excellent processing effect the adaptive Multiple Scale Retinex (MSR) is used to enhance the imaging quality. Second, the Single Shot multi-box Detector (SSD) method is utilized to identify the manhole cover for its stable processing effect. Third, the spatial coordinate of manhole cover is also estimated from the ground image. The practical applications have verified the outdoor environment adaptability of proposed algorithm and the target detection correctness of proposed system. The detection accuracy can reach 99% and the positioning accuracy is about 0.7 meters.