• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.728-735
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• 2017

With the proliferation of digital devices, the devices have generated considerable additive white Gaussian noise while acquiring digital images. The most well-known denoising methods focused on eliminating the noise, so detailed components that include image information were removed proportionally while eliminating the image noise. The proposed algorithm provides a method that preserves the details and effectively removes the noise. In this proposed method, the goal is to separate meaningful detail information in image noise environment using the edge strength and edge connectivity. Consequently, even as the noise level increases, it shows denoising results better than the other benchmark methods because proposed method extracts the connected detail component information. In addition, the proposed method effectively eliminated the noise for various noise levels; compared to the benchmark algorithms, the proposed algorithm shows a highly structural similarity index(SSIM) value and peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR) value, respectively. As shown the result of high SSIMs, it was confirmed that the SSIMs of the denoising results includes a human visual system(HVS).

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.25-33
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• 2023

Noise generated during the acquisition and transmission of CT images acts as a factor that degrades image quality. Therefore, noise removal to solve this problem is an important preprocessing process in image processing. In this paper, we remove noise by using a deformable convolutional autoencoder (DeCAE) model in which deformable convolution operation is applied instead of the existing convolution operation in the convolutional autoencoder (CAE) model of deep learning. Here, the deformable convolution operation can extract features of an image in a more flexible area than the conventional convolution operation. The proposed DeCAE model has the same encoder-decoder structure as the existing CAE model, but the encoder is composed of deformable convolutional layers and the decoder is composed of conventional convolutional layers for efficient noise removal. To evaluate the performance of the DeCAE model proposed in this paper, experiments were conducted on CT images corrupted by various noises, that is, Gaussian noise, impulse noise, and Poisson noise. As a result of the performance experiment, the DeCAE model has more qualitative and quantitative measures than the traditional filters, that is, the Mean filter, Median filter, Bilateral filter and NL-means method, as well as the existing CAE models, that is, MAE (Mean Absolute Error), PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and SSIM. (Structural Similarity Index Measure) showed excellent results.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.191-199
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• 2023

This study aimed to propose minimized radiation doses with an optimized abdomen x-ray image, which realizes a Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution Generative adversarial network (BSRGAN) technique. Entrance surface doses (ESD) measured were collected by changing exposure conditions. In the identical exposures, abdominal images were acquired and were processed with the BSRGAN. The images reconstructed by the BSRGAN were compared to a reference image with 80 kVp and 320 mA, which was evaluated by mean squared error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity index measure (SSIM). In addition, signal profile analysis was employed to validate the effect of the images reconstructed by the BSRGAN. The exposure conditions with the lowest MSE (about 0.285) were shown in 90 kVp, 125 mA and 100 kVp, 100 mA, which decreased the ESD in about 52 to 53% reduction), exhibiting PSNR = 37.694 and SSIM = 0.999. The signal intensity variations in the optimized conditions rather decreased than that of the reference image. This means that the optimized exposure conditions would obtain reasonable image quality with a substantial decrease of the radiation dose, indicating it could sufficiently reflect the concept of As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) as the principle of radiation protection.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.515-521
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• 2023

The radiation dose received by the patient varies according to the tube current and time used during dental intraoral imaging. A large amount of tube current is required for image quality, but the radiation dose to the patient increases accordingly. Therefore, in this study, the optimal amount of tube current that can reduce the radiation dose received by the patient while securing the image quality was calculated through the evaluation of the image quality according to the tube current used during intraoral imaging through simulation. The average tube current, time, and tube voltage presented in the Guidelines for Diagnostic Reference Level for intraoral radiography were used as basic imaging conditions, and images were obtained when only the tube current was changed, and then the optimal tube current was compared and analyzed with the basic image quantity was calculated. Images were obtained by changing the tube current to 0.1, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 mA under the basic conditions of 63 kV, 6 mA, and 0.29 s. The obtained image was evaluated for structural similarity index with the image taken under the condition of 6 mA using the ICY program. As a result, even under the condition of 0.5 mA tube current, the index of structural similarity with the image of 6 mA was evaluated to be high. Based on these results, it is considered that the radiation dose given to the patient can be greatly reduced if imaging is performed at 0.5 mA instead of 6 mA during dental intraoral imaging.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.693-699
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• 2023

Ultrasound is widely used in the medical field for non-destructive and non-invasive disease diagnosis. In order to improve the disease diagnosis accuracy of diagnostic medical images, improving spatial resolution is a very important factor. In this study, we aim to model the super resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN) algorithm in ultrasound images and analyze its applicability in the medical diagnostic field. The study was conducted as an experimental study using Field II simulation and open source clinical liver hemangioma ultrasound imaging. The proposed SRCNN algorithm was modeled so that end-to-end learning can be applied from low resolution (LR) to high resolution. As a result of the simulation, we confirmed that the full width at half maximum in the phantom image using a Field II program was improved by 41.01% compared to LR when SRCNN was used. In addition, the peak to signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) evaluation results showed that SRCNN had the excellent value in both simulated and real liver hemangioma ultrasound images. In conclusion, the applicability of SRCNN to ultrasound images has been proven, and we expected that proposed algorithm can be used in various diagnostic medical fields.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.6_1
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• pp.1245-1254
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• 2023

Significant research has been conducted on the W-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system that utilizes the 77 GHz frequency modulation continuous wave (FMCW) radar. To reconstruct the high-resolution W-band SAR image, it is necessary to transform the point cloud acquired from the stereo cameras or the LiDAR in the direction of 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) and apply them to the SAR signal processing. However, there are difficulties in matching images due to the different geometric structures of images acquired from different sensors. In this study, we present the method to extract an optimized depth map by obtaining 6 DOF of the point cloud using a gradient descent method based on the entropy of the SAR image. An experiment was conducted to reconstruct a tree, which is a major road environment object, using the constructed W-band SAR system. The SAR image, reconstructed using the entropy-based gradient descent method, showed a decrease of 53.2828 in mean square error and an increase of 0.5529 in the structural similarity index, compared to SAR images reconstructed from radar coordinates.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.21-29
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• 2024

Reducing the radiation dose during CT scanning can lower the risk of radiation exposure, but not only does the image resolution significantly deteriorate, but the effectiveness of diagnosis is reduced due to the generation of noise. Therefore, noise removal from CT images is a very important and essential processing process in the image restoration. Until now, there are limitations in removing only the noise by separating the noise and the original signal in the image area. In this paper, we aim to effectively remove noise from CT images using the wavelet transform-based GAN model, that is, the WT-GAN model in the frequency domain. The GAN model used here generates images with noise removed through a U-Net structured generator and a PatchGAN structured discriminator. To evaluate the performance of the WT-GAN model proposed in this paper, experiments were conducted on CT images damaged by various noises, namely Gaussian noise, Poisson noise, and speckle noise. As a result of the performance experiment, the WT-GAN model is better than the traditional filter, that is, the BM3D filter, as well as the existing deep learning models, such as DnCNN, CDAE model, and U-Net GAN model, in qualitative and quantitative measures, that is, PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and SSIM (Structural Similarity Index Measure) showed excellent results.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.5
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• pp.191-200
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• 2013

Full-disk solar images are provided by many solar telescopes around the world. However, the observed images show Non-Radial Variation (NRV) over the disk. In this paper, we propose algorithms for detecting distortions and restoring these images. For detecting NRV, the cross-correlation coefficients matrix of radial profiles is calculated and the minimum value in the matrix is defined as the Index of Non-radial Variation (INV). This index has been utilized to evaluate the H images of GONG, and systemic variations of different instruments are obtained. For obtaining the NRV's image, a Multi-level Morphological Filter (MMF) is designed to eliminate structures produced by solar activities over the solar surface. Comparing with the median filter, the proposed filter is a better choice. The experimental results show that the effect of our automatic detection and restoration methods is significant for getting a flat and high contrast full-disk image. For investigating the effect of our method on solar features, structural similarity (SSIM) index is utilized. The high SSIM indices (close to 1) of solar features show that the details of the structures remain after NRV restoring.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.161-170
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• 2012

This paper presents an efficient and robust approach for determining the correspondence between unbalanced stereo images. The disparity vectors were used instead of feature points, such as corners, to calculate a correspondence relationship. For a faster and optimal estimation, the vectors were classified into several regions, and the homography of each region was calculated using the RANSAC algorithm. The correspondence image was calculated from the images transformed by each homography. Although it provided good results under normal conditions, it was difficult to obtain reliable results in an unbalanced stereo pair. Therefore, a balancing method is also proposed to minimize the unbalance effects using the histogram specification and structural similarity index. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach outperformed the baseline algorithms with respect to the speed and peak-signal-to-noise ratio. This work can be applied to practical fields including 3D depth map acquisition, fast stereo coding, 2D-to-3D conversion, etc.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2009.01a
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• pp.286-289
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• 2009

This paper presents an effective approach to minimize recursive computations for balancing stereo pairs by using disparity vector errors and its directional histogram. A stereo balancing function is computed from the correspondent pixels between two images, and a simple approach is to find the matching blocks of two images. However, this procedure requires recursive operation, and its computation cost is very high. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient balance method using structural similarity index and a partial re-searching scheme to reduce the computation cost considerably. For this purpose, we determine if re-searching for each block is necessary or not by using the errors and the directional histogram of disparity vectors. Experiment results show that the performance of the proposed approach can save the computations significantly with ignorable image quality degradation compared with full re-search approach.