• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.442-453
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• 2020

Underwater color images suffer from low visibility and color cast effects caused by light attenuation by water and floating particles. This study applied single image enhancement techniques to enhance the quality of underwater images and compared their performance with real underwater images taken in Korean waters. Dark channel prior (DCP), gradient transform, image fusion, and generative adversarial networks (GAN), such as cycleGAN and underwater GAN (UGAN), were considered for single image enhancement. Their performance was evaluated in terms of underwater image quality measure, underwater color image quality evaluation, gray-world assumption, and blur metric. The DCP saturated the underwater images to a specific greenish or bluish color tone and reduced the brightness of the background signal. The gradient transform method with two transmission maps were sensitive to the light source and highlighted the region exposed to light. Although image fusion enabled reasonable color correction, the object details were lost due to the last fusion step. CycleGAN corrected overall color tone relatively well but generated artifacts in the background. UGAN showed good visual quality and obtained the highest scores against all figures of merit (FOMs) by compensating for the colors and visibility compared to the other single enhancement methods.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.2552-2570
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• 2022

Underwater images usually have various problems, such as the color cast of underwater images due to the attenuation of different lights in water, the darkness of image caused by the lack of light underwater, and the haze effect of underwater images because of the scattering of light. To address the above problems, the channel attention mechanism, strengthen-operate-subtract (SOS) boosting mechanism and gated fusion module are introduced in our paper, based on which, an underwater image recovery network is proposed. First, for the color cast problem of underwater images, the channel attention mechanism is incorporated in our model, which can well alleviate the color cast of underwater images. Second, as for the darkness of underwater images, the similarity between the target underwater image after dehazing and color correcting, and the image output by our model is used as the loss function, so as to increase the brightness of the underwater image. Finally, we employ the SOS boosting module to eliminate the haze effect of underwater images. Moreover, experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of our model. The qualitative analysis results show that our method can be applied to effectively recover the underwater images, which outperformed most methods for comparison according to various criteria in the quantitative analysis.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.32-40
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• 2022

Underwater optical images face various limitations that degrade the image quality compared with optical images taken in our atmosphere. Attenuation according to the wavelength of light and reflection by very small floating objects cause low contrast, blurry clarity, and color degradation in underwater images. We constructed an image data of the Korean sea and enhanced it by learning the characteristics of underwater images using the deep learning techniques of CycleGAN (cycle-consistent adversarial network), UGAN (underwater GAN), FUnIE-GAN (fast underwater image enhancement GAN). In addition, the underwater optical image was enhanced using the image processing technique of Image Fusion. For a quantitative performance comparison, UIQM (underwater image quality measure), which evaluates the performance of the enhancement in terms of colorfulness, sharpness, and contrast, and UCIQE (underwater color image quality evaluation), which evaluates the performance in terms of chroma, luminance, and saturation were calculated. For 100 underwater images taken in Korean seas, the average UIQMs of CycleGAN, UGAN, and FUnIE-GAN were 3.91, 3.42, and 2.66, respectively, and the average UCIQEs were measured to be 29.9, 26.77, and 22.88, respectively. The average UIQM and UCIQE of Image Fusion were 3.63 and 23.59, respectively. CycleGAN and UGAN qualitatively and quantitatively improved the image quality in various underwater environments, and FUnIE-GAN had performance differences depending on the underwater environment. Image Fusion showed good performance in terms of color correction and sharpness enhancement. It is expected that this method can be used for monitoring underwater works and the autonomous operation of unmanned vehicles by improving the visibility of underwater situations more accurately.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.840-866
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• 2014

Visibility in underwater images is usually poor because of the attenuation of light in the water that causes low contrast and color variation. In this paper, a new approach for underwater image quality improvement is presented. The proposed method aims to improve underwater image contrast, increase image details, and reduce noise by applying a new method of using contrast stretching to produce two different images with different contrasts. The proposed method integrates the modification of the image histogram in two main color models, RGB and HSV. The histograms of the color channel in the RGB color model are modified and remapped to follow the Rayleigh distribution within certain ranges. The image is then converted to the HSV color model, and the S and V components are modified within a certain limit. Qualitative and quantitative analyses indicate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of contrast, details, and noise reduction. The image color also shows much improvement.

• Journal of Conservation Science
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.14-32
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• 2022

Underwater photographing and image recording are essential for pre-excavation survey and during excavation in underwater archaeology. Unlike photographing on land, all underwater images suffer various quality degradations such as shape distortions, color shift, blur, low contrast, high noise levels and so on. Outcome is very often heavily photographing equipment and photographer dependent. Excavation schedule, weather conditions, and water conditions can put burdens on divers. Usable images are very limited compared to the efforts. In underwater archaeological study in very turbid water such as in the Yellow Sea (between mainland China and the Korean peninsula), underwater photographing is very challenging. In this study, off-site image distortion and color compensation techniques using an image processing/analysis software is investigated as an alternative image quality enhancement method. As sample images, photographs taken during the excavation of 800-year-old Taean Mado Shipwrecks in the Yellow Sea in 2008-2010 were mainly used. Significant enhancement in distortion and color compensation of archived images were obtained by simple post image processing using image processing/analysis software (PicMan) customized for given view ports, lenses and cameras with and without optical axis offsets. Post image processing is found to be very effective in distortion and color compensation of both recent and archived images from various photographing equipment models and configurations. Merits and demerit of in-situ, distortion and color compensated photographing with sophisticated equipment and conventional photographing equipment, which requires post image processing, are compared.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.23-27
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• 2024

Underwater images are typically degraded due to color distortion, light absorption, scattering, and noise from artificial light sources. Restoration of these images is an essential task in many underwater applications. In this paper, we propose a two-phase deep learning-based method, Underwater Deep Curve Estimation (UWDCE), designed to effectively enhance the quality of underwater images. The first phase involves a white balancing and color correction technique to compensate for color imbalances. The second phase introduces a novel deep learning model, UWDCE, to learn the mapping between the color-corrected image and its best-fitting curve parameter maps. The model operates iteratively, applying light-enhancement curves to achieve better contrast and maintain pixel values within a normalized range. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, producing higher-quality images compared to state-of-the-art methods.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07e
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• pp.2259-2262
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• 2003

This paper describes visual tracking procedure of the underwater mobile robot for nuclear reactor vessel inspection, which is required to find the foreign objects such as loose parts. The yellowish underwater robot body tend to present a big contrast to boron solute cold water of nuclear reactor vessel, tinged with indigo by Cerenkov effect. In this paper, we have found and tracked the positions of underwater mobile robot using the two color informations, yellow and indigo. The center coordinates extraction procedures is as follows. The first step is to segment the underwater robot body to cold water with indigo background. From the RGB color components of the entire monitoring image taken with the color CCD camera, we have selected the red color component. In the selected red image, we extracted the positions of the underwater mobile robot using the following process sequences: binarization labelling, and centroid extraction techniques. In the experiment carried out at the Youngkwang unit 5 nuclear reactor vessel, we have tracked the center positions of the underwater robot submerged near the cold leg and the hot leg way, which is fathomed to 10m deep in depth.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.1244-1248
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• 2003

This paper describes visual tracking procedure of the underwater mobile robot for nuclear reactor vessel inspection, which is required to find the foreign objects such as loose parts. The yellowish underwater robot body tends to present a big contrast to boron solute cold water of nuclear reactor vessel, tinged with indigo by Cerenkov effect. In this paper, we have found and tracked the positions of underwater mobile robot using the two color information, yellow and indigo. The center coordinates extraction procedures are as follows. The first step is to segment the underwater robot body to cold water with indigo background. From the RGB color components of the entire monitoring image taken with the color CCD camera, we have selected the red color component. In the selected red image, we extracted the positions of the underwater mobile robot using the following process sequences; binarization, labelling, and centroid extraction techniques. In the experiment carried out at the Youngkwang unit 5 nuclear reactor vessel, we have tracked the center positions of the underwater robot submerged near the cold leg and the hot leg way, which is fathomed to 10m deep in depth.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.645-652
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• 2015

In underwater, such as fish farm and sea, turbidity is increased by water droplets and various suspended, therefore light attenuation occurs depending on the depth also caused by the scattering effect of light float. In this paper, in order to improve the visibility of underwater images obtained from these aquatic environment, we propose a visibility enhancement method using a haze removal method based on dark channel prior and a trained color transform model. In order to train a color transform model, we used underwater pattern images captured from Pohang and Yeosu, and to measure the performance of the proposed method, we carried out experiment of visibility enhancement using underwater images collected from Yeosu, Geomundo and Philippines. The results show that the proposed method can improve the visibility of underwater images of various locations.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.200-206
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• 2016

Images can be obtained by collecting rays from objects. The characteristics of electromagnetic wave propagation depend on the medium. In particular, in an underwater imaging system, the interface between air and water must be considered. Further, reflection and transmission coefficients can be found by using electromagnetic theory. Because of the fact that the values of these coefficients differ according to the media, the recorded light intensities will change. A color image sensor has three different color channels. Therefore, the reflection and transmission coefficients have to be calculated individually. Thereafter, by using these coefficients, we can compensate for the color information of underwater objects. In this paper, we present a method to compensate for the color information of underwater objects by using electromagnetic wave propagation theory. To prove our method, we conducted optical experiments and evaluated the quality of the compensated image by a metric known as mean square error.