• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.465-471
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• 2023

This paper proposes a comparator structure that improves the noise and output delay of a single-slope ADC(SS-ADC) used in CMOS Image Sensor (CIS). To improve the noise and delay characteristics of the output, a comparator structure using the miller effect is designed by inserting a capacitor between the output node of the first stage and the output node of the second stage of the comparator. The proposed comparator structure improves the noise, delay of the output, and layout area by using a small capacitor. The CDS counter used in the single slop ADC is designed using a T-filp flop and bitwise inversion circuit, which improves power consumption and speed. The single-slope ADC also performs dual CDS, which combines analog correlated double sampling (CDS) and digital CDS. By performing dual CDS, image quality is improved by reducing fixed pattern noise (FPN), reset noise, and ADC error. The single-slope ADC with the proposed comparator structure is designed in a 0.18-㎛ CMOS process.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.686-692
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• 2006

This paper shows the calculation of 3D geometric information such as height, direction and distance under the constraints of a catadioptric camera system. The catadioptric camera system satisfies the single viewpoint constraints adopting hyperboloidal mirror. To calculate the 3D information with a single omni-directional image, the points are assumed to lie in perpendicular to the ground. The infinite plane is also detected as a circle from the structure of the mirror and camera. The analytic experiments verify the correctness of theory using real images taken in indoor environments like rooms or corridors. Thus, the experimental results show the applicability to calculate the 3D geometric information using single omni-directional images.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.74-83
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• 2023

In this paper, we propose an image compression scheme which uses a demosaicking network and a channel-wise decoder in the decoding network. For the demosaicing network, we use as the input a colored mosaiced pattern rather than the well-known Bayer pattern. The use of a colored mosaiced pattern results in the mosaiced image containing a greater amount of information pertaining to the original image. Therefore, it contributes to result in a better color reconstruction. The channel-wise decoder is composed of multiple decoders where each decoder is responsible for each channel in the color image, i.e., the R, G, and B channels. The encoder and decoder are both implemented by wavelet based auto-encoders for better performance. Experimental results verify that the separated channel-wise decoders and the colored mosaic pattern produce a better reconstructed color image than a single decoder. When combining the colored CFA with the multi-decoder, the PSNR metric exhibits an increase of over 2dB for three-times compression and approximately 0.6dB for twelve-times compression compared to the Bayer CFA with a single decoder. Therefore, the compression rate is also increased with the proposed method than with the method using a single decoder on the Bayer patterned mosaic image.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.40 no.8
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• pp.1655-1666
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• 2015

In this paper, user-position estimation method is proposed by using a single camera for both indoor and outdoor environments. Conventionally, the GPS of RF-based estimation methods have been widely studied in the literature for outdoor and indoor environments, respectively. Each method is useful only for indoor or outdoor environment. In this context, this study adopts a vision-based approach which can be commonly applicable to both environments. Since the distance or position cannot be extracted from a single still image, the reference images pro-stored in image database are used to identify the current position from the single still image captured by a single camera. The reference image is tagged with its captured position. To find the reference image which is the most similar to the current image, the SURF algorithm is used for feature extraction. The outliers in extracted features are discarded by using RANSAC algorithm. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated for two buildings and their outsides for both indoor and outdoor environments, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.11
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• pp.64-69
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• 2013

In this paper, a high-speed CMOS Image Sensor (CIS) based on a 10-bit two-step single-slope A/D converter is proposed. The A/D converter is composed of both a 5-bit coarse ADC and a 6-bit fine ADC, and the conversion speed is 10 times faster than that of the single-slope A/D converter. In order to have a small noise characteristics, further, a Digital Correlated Double Sampling(D-CDS) is also discussed. The proposed A/D converter has been fabricated with 0.13um 1-poly 4-metal CIS process, and it has a QVGA($320{\times}240$) resolution. The fabricated chip size is $5mm{\times}3mm$, and the power consumption is about 35mW at 3.3V supply voltage. The measured conversion speed is 10us, and the frame rate is 220 frames/s.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2013.06a
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• pp.322-324
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• 2013

Haze is an extreme reason of the reduction of contrast when capturing image in the outdoor. Recently, there are several single image dehazing techniques, but they are not robust in dynamic variations of natural environment caused by the thickness, coverage of haze and appearance of sunlight. In this paper, we propose an effective and robust method to enhance luminance for image dehazing depending on histogram analysis. Compare with conventional methods, our proposal have better performance in term of contrast, and computation time.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2007.10a
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• pp.452-455
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• 2007

3D stereoscopic viewing of large scale imagery, such as aerial photography and satellite images, needs different parallaxes relative to the display scale. For example, when a viewer sees a stereoscopic image of aerial photography, the optimal parallax of its zoom-in image should be smaller than that of its zoom-out. Therefore, relative parallax adjustment according to the display scale is required. Merely adjusting the spacing between stereo images is not appropriate because the depths of the whole image are either exaggerated or reduced entirely. This paper focuses on the improving stereoscopic viewing with a single remote sensing image and a digital surface model (DSM). We present the parallax adjustment technique to maximize the 3D realistic effect and the visual comfort. For remote sensing data, DSM height value can be regarded as disparity. There are two possible kinds of methods to adjust the relative parallax with a single image performance. One is the DSM compression technique: the other is an adjustment of the distance between the original image and its stereo-mate. In our approach, we carried out a test to evaluate the optimal distance between a single remote sensing image and its stereo-mate, relative to the viewing scale. Several synthetic stereo-mates according to certain viewing scale were created using a parallel projection model and their anaglyphs were estimated visually. The occlusion of the synthetic stereo-mate was restored by the inpainting method using the fields of experts (FoE) model. With the experiments using QuickBird imagery, we could obtain stereoscopic images with optimized parallax at varied display scales.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.2341-2347
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• 2021

Because single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is one of the widely used nuclear medicine imaging systems, it is extremely important to acquire high-quality images for diagnosis. In this study, we designed a super-resolution (SR) technique using dense block-based deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and evaluated the algorithm on real SPECT phantom images. To acquire the phantom images, a real SPECT system using a^99mTc source and two physical phantoms was used. To confirm the image quality, the noise properties and visual quality metric evaluation parameters were calculated. The results demonstrate that our proposed method delivers a more valid SR improvement by using dense block-based deep CNNs as compared to conventional reconstruction techniques. In particular, when the proposed method was used, the quantitative performance was improved from 1.2 to 5.0 times compared to the result of using the conventional iterative reconstruction. Here, we confirmed the effects on the image quality of the resulting SR image, and our proposed technique was shown to be effective for nuclear medicine imaging.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.101-110
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• 2021

In computer vision, single-image super resolution has been an area of research for a significant period. Traditional techniques involve interpolation-based methods such as Nearest-neighbor, Bilinear, and Bicubic for image restoration. Although implementations of convolutional neural networks have provided outstanding results in recent years, efficiency and single model multi-scalability have been its challenges. Furthermore, previous works haven't placed enough emphasis on real-number scalability. Interpolation-based techniques, however, have no limit in terms of scalability as they are able to upscale images to any desired size. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network possessing the advantages of the interpolation-based techniques, which is also efficient, deeming it suitable in practical implementations. It consists of convolutional layers applied on the low-resolution space, post-up-sampling along the end hidden layers, and additional layers on high-resolution space. Up-sampling is applied on a multiple channeled feature map via bicubic interpolation using a single model. Experiments on architectural structure, layer reduction, and real-number scale training are executed with results proving efficient amongst multi-scale learning (including scale multi-path-learning) based models.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.18-24
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• 2004

SPECT technology is used for the reconstructed image in the field of industry noncontact measurement system. One of the distortion problems in reconstructed image quality is a collimator characterictic. The image distortion is caused by a geometrical structure of the collimator. This paper indicated a correction method to remove the image distortion by the structure of the collimator, and compared with the existing correction method. The correction. method removed the image distortion to use deconvolution of projection data with the shift-variant blurring function in the frequency domain. In this pater, I simulated with the collimator angle and distance between the detector and the center of object. and verified with expeimental data. The validity and limitation of correction method is studied for actual industrial applications.