• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.9B no.3
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• pp.375-382
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• 2002

Handwritten character recognition is classified into on-line handwritten character recognition and off-line handwritten character recognition. On-line handwritten character recognition has made a remarkable outcome compared to off-line hacdwritten character recognition. This method can acquire the dynamic written information such as the writing order and the position of a stroke by means of pen-based electronic input device such as a tablet board. On the contrary, Any dynamic information can not be acquired in off-line handwritten character recognition since there are extreme overlapping between consonants and vowels, and heavily noisy images between strokes, which change the recognition performance with the result of the preprocessing. This paper proposes a method that effectively extracts the stroke including dynamic information of characters for off-line Korean handwritten character recognition. First of all, this method makes improvement and binarization of input handwritten character image as preprocessing procedure using watershed algorithm. The next procedure is extraction of skeleton by using the transformed Lu and Wang's thinning: algorithm, and segment pixel array is extracted by abstracting the feature point of the characters. Then, the vectorization is executed with a maximum permission error method. In the case that a few strokes are bound in a segment, a segment pixel array is divided with two or more segment vectors. In order to reconstruct the extracted segment vector with a complete stroke, the directional component of the vector is mortified by using right-hand writing coordinate system. With combination of segment vectors which are adjacent and can be combined, the reconstruction of complete stroke is made out which is suitable for character recognition. As experimentation, it is verified that the proposed method is suitable for handwritten Korean character recognition.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.6-17
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• 2013

Recently, the color of vehicle license plate has been changed from green to white. Thus the vehicle plate recognition system used for parking management systems, speed and signal violation detection systems should be robust to the both colors. This paper presents a vehicle license plate recognition system, which works on both of green and white plate at the same time. In the proposed system, the image of license plate is taken from a captured vehicle image by using morphological information. In the next, each character region in the license plate image is extracted based on the vertical and horizontal projection of plate image and the relative position of individual characters. Finally, for the recognition process of extracted characters, PCA(Principal Component Analysis) and LDA(Linear Discriminant Analysis) are sequentially utilized. In the experiment, vehicle license plates of both green background and white background captured under irregular illumination conditions have been tested, and the relatively high extraction and recognition rates are observed.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.1462-1470
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• 2015

The container BIC-code is a transport protocol for convenience in international shipping and combined transport environment. It is an identification code of a marine transport container which displays a wide variety of information including country's code. Recently, transportation through aircrafts and ships continues to rise. Thus fast and accurate processes are required in the ports to manage transportation. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a BIC-code region extraction and recognition method using multiple thresholds. In the code recognition, applying a fixed threshold is not reasonable due to a variety of illumination conditions caused by change of weather, lightening, camera position, color of the container and so on. Thus, the proposed method selects the best recognition result at the final stage after applying multiple thresholds to recognition. For each threshold, we performs binarization, labeling, BIC-code pattern decision (horizontal or vertical pattern) by morphological close operation, and character separation from the BIC-code. Then, each characters is recognized by template matching. Finally we measure recognition confidence scores for all the thresholds and choose the best one. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields accurate recognition for the container BIC-code with robustness to illumination change.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.530-536
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• 2020

The use of minutiae by fingerprint readers is robust against presentation attacks, but one weakness is that the mismatch rate is high. Therefore, minutiae tend to be used with skeleton images. There have been many studies on security vulnerabilities in the characteristics of minutiae, but vulnerability studies on the skeleton are weak, so this study attempts to analyze the vulnerability of presentation attacks against the skeleton. To this end, we propose a method based on the skeleton to recover the original fingerprint using a learning algorithm. The proposed method includes a new learning model, Pix2Pix, which adds a latent vector to the existing Pix2Pix model, thereby generating a natural fingerprint. In the experimental results, the original fingerprint is restored using the proposed machine learning, and then, the restored fingerprint is the input for the fingerprint reader in order to achieve a good recognition rate. Thus, this study verifies that fingerprint readers using the skeleton are vulnerable to presentation attacks. The approach presented in this paper is expected to be useful in a variety of applications concerning fingerprint restoration, video security, and biometrics.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.1068-1077
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• 2007

This paper proposes a method that extracts characteristics of cracks such as length, thickness and direction from a concrete slab surface image with image processing techniques. These techniques extract the cracks from the concrete surface image in variable conditions including bad image conditions) using the ART2-based RBF network to recognize the dominant directions -45 degree, 45 degree, horizontal and vertical) of the extracted cracks from the automatically calculated specifications like the lengths, directions and widths of the cracks. Our proposed extraction algorithms and analysis of the concrete cracks used a Robert operation to emphasize the cracks, and a Multiple operation to increase the difference in brightness between the cracks and background. After these treatments, the cracks can be extracted from the image by using an iterated binarization technique. Noise reduction techniques are used three separate times on this binarized image, and the specifications of the cracks are extracted form this noiseless image. The dominant directions can be recognized by using the ART2-based RBF network. In this method, the ART2 is used between the input layer and the middle layer to learn, and the Delta learning method is used between the middle layer and the output layer. The experiments using real concrete images showed that the cracks were effectively extracted, and the Proposed ART2-based RBF network effectively recognized the directions of the extracted cracks.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.12
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• pp.113-123
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• 2012

Recently, various attempts have been made to apply Intelligent Transportation System under various environments and conditions. Consequently, an accurate license plate recognition regardless of vehicle location and viewing angle is required. In this paper, we propose a novel license plate recognition system which exploits a) the format of license plates to remove false candidates of license plates and to extract characters in license plates and b) the characteristics of Hangul for accurate character recognition. In order to eliminate false candidates of license plates, the proposed method first aligns the candidates of license plates horizontally, and compares the position and the shape of objects in each candidate with the prior information of license plates provided by Korean Ministry of Construction & Transportation. The prior information such as aspect ratio, background color, projection image is also used to extract characters in license plates accurately applying an improved local binarization considering luminance variation of license plates. In case of recognizing Hangul in license plates, they are initially grouped according to their shape similarity. Then a super-class method, a hierarchical analysis based on key feature points is applied to recognize Hangul accurately. The proposed method was verified with high recognition rate regardless of background image, which eventually proves that the proposed LPR system has high performance regardless of the vehicle location or viewing angle.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.9 no.9
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• pp.31-39
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• 2018

In this paper, we proposed a license plate detection method based on contour extraction that adapts to environmental changes. The proposed method extracts contour lines using DoG (Difference of Gaussian) to remove unnecessary noise parts in the contour extraction process. Binarization was applied in ugly outline images, and erosion and dilation operations were used to emphasize the contour of the character part. Then, only the outline of the ratio of the characters of the plate was extracted through the ratio of the width and height of the characters. And the case where the outline is the longest is estimated by estimating the characters of the license plate. For the experiment, we applied 130 image data to license plate on the front of the vehicle, oblique environment, and environment images with various backgrounds. I also experimented with motorcycle images of different license plate patterns. Experimental results showed that the detection rate of the oblique image was 93% and that of the various background environment was 70% in the motorcycle image but 98% in the front image.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.9
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• pp.1296-1301
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• 2008

Ultrasonography constructs pictures of areas inside the body needs in diagnosis by bouncing high-enorgy sound waves(ultrasound) off internal tissues or organs. In constructing an ultrasonographic image, the weakness of bounding signals induces noises and detailed differences of brightness, so that having a difficulty in detecting and diagnosing with the naked eyes in the analysis of ultrasonogram. Especially, the difficulty is extended when diagnosing muscle areas by using ultrasonographic images in the musculoskeletal test. In this paper, we propose a novel image processing method that computationally extracts a muscle area from an ultrasonographic image to assist in diagnosis. An ultrasonographic image consists of areas corresponding to various tissues and internal organs. The proposed method, based on features of intensity distribution, morphology and size of each area, extracts areas of the fascia, the subcutaneous fat and other internal organs, and then extracts a muscle area enclosed by areas of the fascia. In the extraction of areas of the fascia, a series of image processing methods such as histogram stretching, multiple operation, binarization and area connection by labeling is applied. A muscle area is extracted by using features on relative position and morphology of areas for the fascia and muscle areas. The performance evaluation using real ultrasonographic images and specialists' analysis show that the proposed method is able to extract target areas being approximate to real muscle areas.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.235-247
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• 2002

For an efficient indexing and retrieval of digital video data, research on video caption extraction and recognition is required. This paper proposes methods for extracting artificial captions from video data and enhancing their image quality for an accurate Hangul and English character recognition. In the proposed methods, we first find locations of beginning and ending frames of the same caption contents and combine those multiple frames in each group by logical operation to remove background noises. During this process an evaluation is performed for detecting the integrated results with different caption images. After the multiple video frames are integrated, four different image enhancement techniques are applied to the image: resolution enhancement, contrast enhancement, stroke-based binarization, and morphological smoothing operations. By applying these operations to the video frames we can even improve the image quality of phonemes with complex strokes. Finding the beginning and ending locations of the frames with the same caption contents can be effectively used for the digital video indexing and browsing. We have tested the proposed methods with the video caption images containing both Hangul and English characters from cinema, and obtained the improved results of the character recognition.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.90-100
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to detect and label the vehicles using the drone images as a way to overcome the limitation of the existing point and section detection system and vehicle gap estimation on Arterial road. In order to select the appropriate time zone, position, and altitude for the acquisition of the drone image data, the final image data was acquired by shooting under various conditions. The vehicle was detected by applying mixed Gaussian, image binarization and morphology among various image analysis techniques, and the vehicle was labeled by applying Kalman filter. As a result of the labeling rate analysis, it was confirmed that the vehicle labeling rate is 65% by detecting 185 out of 285 vehicles. The gap was calculated by pixel unitization, and the results were verified through comparison and analysis with Daum maps. As a result, the gap error was less than 5m and the mean error was 1.67m with the preceding vehicle and 1.1m with the following vehicle. The gaps estimated in this study can be used as the density of the urban roads and the criteria for judging the service level.