• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.845-852
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a binarization algorithm using LVQ-Merge clustering method for fast and accurate extraction of cells from cell images. The proposed method clusters pixel data of a given image by using LVQ to remove noise and divides the result into two clusters by applying a hierarchical clustering algorithm to improve the accuracy of binarization. As a result, the execution speed is somewhat slower than that of the conventional LVQ or Otsu algorithm. However, the results of the binarization have very good quality and are almost identical to those judged by the human eye. Especially, the bigger and the more complex the image, the better the binarization quality. This suggests that the proposed method is a useful method for medical image processing field where high-resolution and huge medical images must be processed in real time. In addition, this method is possible to have many clusters instead of two cluster, so it can be used as a method to complement a hierarchical clustering algorithm.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.7-12
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• 2014

A vehicle license plate includes the most important information for recognition and classification of the vehicle. In this paper, we propose a vehicle license plate recognition system using image binarization and template matching. In the proposed system, an image of the vehicle license plate is converted into a gray scale image and the gray image undergoes the binarization process. Finally, the numbers on the plate are extracted from the binary image using the template matching algorithm.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.27-34
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• 2012

In this paper, a novel text binarization is presented that can deal with some complex conditions, such as shadows, non-uniform illumination due to highlight or object projection, and messy backgrounds. To locate the target text region, a focus line is assumed to pass through a text region. Next, connected component analysis and stroke width estimation based on location information of the focus line is used to locate the bounding box of the text region, and each box of connected components. A series of classifications are applied to identify whether each CC(Connected component) is text or non-text. Also, a modified K-means clustering method based on an HCL color space is applied to reduce the color dimension. A text binarization procedure based on location of text component and seed color pixel is then used to generate the final result.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.55-68
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• 2014

Automatic segmentation of foreground text from the background in degraded document images is very much essential for the smooth reading of the document content and recognition tasks by machine. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the binarization of degraded document images. The proposed method uses a new local contrast feature extracted based on the stroke width of text. First, a pre-processing method is carried out for noise removal. Text boundary detection is then performed on the image constructed from the contrast feature. Then local estimation follows to extract text from the background. Finally, a refinement procedure is applied to the binarized image as a post-processing step to improve the quality of the final results. Experiments and comparisons of extracting text from degraded handwriting and machine-printed document image against some well-known binarization algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.1649-1657
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• 2008

In this paper, to overcome the failure of binarization for the characters suffered from low contrast and non-uniform illumination in license plate character recognition system, we improved the binarization method by combining local thresholding with global thresholding and edge detection. Firstly, apply the local thresholding method to locate the characters in the license plate image and then get the threshold value for the character based on edge detector. This method solves the problem of local low contrast and non-uniform illumination. Finally, back-propagation Neural Network is selected as a powerful tool to perform the recognition process. The results of the experiments i1lustrate that the proposed binarization method works well and the selected classifier saves the processing time. Besides, the character recognition system performed better recognition accuracy 95.7%, and the recognition speed is controlled within 0.3 seconds.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.56-63
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• 2014

This paper deals with a binarization for plate number recognition. The binarization process converts an image into a binary image and plays an important role for automatically recognizing plate number. The rear license plate has often a shadowed image which causes erroneous binarized image due to non-uniform illumination. In this paper, a binarization method is proposed in which the shadow line is detected in a rear plate with a shadow. And then the histogram matching is conducted for the two image separated by the shadow line. After histogram matching, two images are joined and finally Otsu method is applied for the binarization. In the experiment, the proposed algorithm shows robust performance compared to the conventional method in the presence of estimation error in the shadow line.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.11C
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• pp.1140-1151
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• 2003

This paper proposes a face recognition method based on modified Otsu's binarization and Hu moment. Proposed method is robust to brightness, contrast, scale, rotation, and translation changes. As the proposed modified Otsu's binarization computes other thresholds from conventional Otsu's binarization, namely we create two binary images, we can extract higher dimensional feature vector. Here the feature vector has properties of robustness to brightness and contrast changes because the proposed method is based on Otsu's binarization. And our face recognition system is robust to scale, rotation, and translation changes because of using Hu moment. In the perspective of brightness, contrast, scale, rotation, and translation changes, experimental results with Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) database and the AR database showed that average recognition rates of conventional well-known principal component analysis (PCA) are 93.2% and 81.4%, respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed method for the same databases has superior performance of the average recognition rates of 93.2% and 81.4%, respectively.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.1269-1274
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• 2014

In computer vision research, binarization procedure is one of the most frequently used tools to discriminate target objects from background in grey level binary image. Fuzzy binarization is a reliable technique in environment with high uncertainty such as medical image analysis by setting the threshold as the average of minimum and maximum brightness with triangle type fuzzy membership function. However, this technique is also known as contrast sensitive method thus its discrimination power is not so great when the image has low contrast difference between objects and backgrounds and suffer from information loss as a result. Thus, in this paper, we propose a fuzzy binarization using ART2 algorithm to handle such low contrast image analysis. Proposed ART2 algorithm is applied to determine the medium point of membership function in the fuzzy binarization paradigm. The proposed methods shows low information loss rate in our experiment.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.10
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• pp.1852-1859
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• 2016

The effectiveness of a binarization algorithm in image processing depends on how to eliminate the uncertainty of determining threshold in a reasonable way and on minimizing information loss due to the binarization effect. Fuzzy binarization technique was proposed to handle that uncertainty with fuzzy logic. However, that method is known to be inefficient when the given image has low intensity contrast. In this paper, we propose an improved fuzzy binarization method to overcome such known drawbacks. Our method proposes a trapezoid type fuzzy membership function instead of most-frequently used triangle type one. We also propose an adaptive ${\alpha}$_cut determination policy. Our proposed method has less information loss than other algorithms since we do not use any stretching based preprocessing for enhancing the intensity contrast. In experiment, our proposed method is verified to be more effective in binarization with less information loss for many different types of images with low intensity contrast such as night scenery, lumber scoliosis, and lipoma images.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.65 no.9
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• pp.1531-1540
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose vehicle license plate recognition system based on Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNNs) with the use of local binarization functions and canny edge algorithm. In order to detect the area of license plate and also recognize license plate numbers, binary images are generated by using local binarization methods, which consider local brightness, and canny edge detection. The generated binary images provide information related to the size and the position of license plate. Additionally, image warping is used to compensate the distortion of images obtained from the side. After extracting license plate numbers, the dimensionality of number images is reduced through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and is used as input variables to RBFNNs. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to optimize a number of essential parameters needed to improve the accuracy of RBFNNs. Those optimized parameters include the number of clusters and the fuzzification coefficient used in the FCM algorithm, and the orders of polynomial of networks. Image data sets are obtained by changing the distance between stationary vehicle and camera and then used to evaluate the performance of the proposed system.