• Advances in robotics research
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.141-149
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• 2018

In image processing and robotic applications, two-dimensional (2D) black and white patterned planar markers are widely used. However, these markers are not detectable in low visibility environment and they are not changeable. This research proposes an active and adaptive marker node, which displays 2D marker patterns using light emitting diode (LED) arrays for easier recognition in the foggy or turbid underwater environments. Because each node is made to blink at a different frequency, active LED marker nodes were distinguishable from each other from a long distance without increasing the size of the marker. We expect that the proposed system can be used in various harsh conditions where the conventional marker systems are not applicable because of low visibility issues. The proposed system is still compatible with the conventional marker as the displayed patterns are identical.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.1635-1640
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• 2017

In this paper, a hierarchical image tree model for weather classification is defined in a single outdoor image, and a weather classification algorithm using image intensity and k-mean segmentation image is proposed. In the first level of the hierarchical image tree model, the indoor and outdoor images are distinguished. Whether the outdoor image is daytime, night, or sunrise/sunset image is judged using the intensity and the k-means segmentation image at the second level. In the last level, if it is classified as daytime image at the second level, it is finally estimated whether it is sunny or foggy image based on edge map and fog rate. Some experiments are conducted so as to verify the weather classification, and as a result, the proposed method shows that weather features are effectively detected in a given image.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.341-363
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• 2016

Haze or fog is a common natural phenomenon. In foggy weather, the captured pictures are difficult to be applied to computer vision system, such as road traffic detection, target tracking, etc. Therefore, the image dehazing technique has become a hotspot in the field of image processing. This paper presents an overview of the existing achievements on the image dehazing technique. The intent of this paper is not to review all the relevant works that have appeared in the literature, but rather to focus on two main works, that is, image dehazing scheme based on atmospheric veil and image dehazing scheme based on dark channel prior. After the overview and a comparative study, we propose an improved image dehazing method, which is based on two image dehazing schemes mentioned above. Our image dehazing method can obtain the fog-free images by proposing a more desirable atmospheric veil and estimating atmospheric light more accurately. In addition, we adjust the transmission of the sky regions and conduct tone mapping for the obtained images. Compared with other state of the art algorithms, experiment results show that images recovered by our algorithm are clearer and more natural, especially at distant scene and places where scene depth jumps abruptly.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.984-987
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• 2019

Recently, autonomous driving technology based on object recognition and lane recognition has attracted attention. However, in foggy weather, haze removal technology is needed because it is difficult to recognize surrounding objects. The technology of removing hazy is currently being studied in many ways, and a single image based haze removal algorithms are typical. In this paper, we design the hardware for haze removal by estimating the hazy partical map. Proposed hardware architecture is designed to have a cumulative histogram based filter that does not affect the hardware size even if the window size of filter increases. The hardware design is implemented with XILINX's xc7z045-ffg900 as the target board.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.738-747
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• 2015

It is difficult to use a recognition algorithm of an image in a foggy environment because the color and edge information is removed. One of the famous defogging algorithm is haze removal by using 'Dark Channel Prior(DCP)' which is used to predict for transmission rate using color information of an image and eliminates fog from the image. However, in case that the image has factors such as sunset or yellow dust, there is overemphasized problem on the color of certain channel after haze removal. Furthermore, in case that the image includes an object containing high RGB channel, the transmission related to this area causes a misestimated issue. In this paper, we purpose an enhanced fog elimination algorithm by using improved color normalization and haze rate revision which correct mis-estimation haze area on the basis of color information and edge information of an image. By eliminating the color distortion, we can obtain more natural clean image from the haze image.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.24 no.10
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• pp.1319-1325
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• 2021

It is important to remove fog for accurate object recognition and detection during preprocessing because images taken in foggy adverse weather suffer from poor quality of images due to scattering and absorption of light, resulting in poor performance of various vision-based applications. This paper proposes an end-to-end deep learning-based single image de-fogging method using U-Net architecture. The loss function used in the algorithm is a loss function based on Mahalanobis distance with fog features, which solves the problem of domain shifts, and demonstrates superior performance by comparing qualitative and quantitative numerical evaluations with conventional methods. We also design it to generate fog through the VGG19 loss function and use it as the next training dataset.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.269-279
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• 2020

Traffic estimation mainly involves surveying equipment such as automatic vehicle classification, vehicle detection system, toll collection system, and personnel surveys through CCTV (Closed Circuit TeleVision), but this requires a lot of manpower and cost. In this study, we proposed a method of estimating traffic volume using deep learning and stereo CCTV to overcome the limitation of not detecting the entire vehicle in case of single CCTV. COCO (Common Objects in Context) dataset was used to train deep learning models to detect vehicles, and each vehicle was detected in left and right CCTV images in real time. Then, the vehicle that could not be detected from each image was additionally detected by using affine transformation to improve the accuracy of traffic volume. Experiments were conducted separately for the normal road environment and the case of weather conditions with fog. In the normal road environment, vehicle detection improved by 6.75% and 5.92% in left and right images, respectively, than in a single CCTV image. In addition, in the foggy road environment, vehicle detection was improved by 10.79% and 12.88% in the left and right images, respectively.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.168-176
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• 2014

Detecting moving objects from a video sequence is a fundamental and critical task in video surveillance, traffic monitoring and analysis, and human detection and tracking. It is very difficult to detect moving objects in a video sequence degraded by the environmental factor such as fog. In particular, the color of an object become similar to the neighbor and it reduces the saturation, thus making it very difficult to distinguish the object from the background. For such a reason, it is shown that the performance and reliability of object detection and tracking are poor in the foggy weather. In this paper, we propose a novel method to improve the performance of object detection, combining a haze removal algorithm and a local histogram-based object tracking method. For the quantitative evaluation of the proposed system, information retrieval measurements, recall and precision, are used to quantify how well the performance is improved before and after the haze removal. As a result, the visibility of the image is enhanced and the performance of objects detection is improved.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.96-110
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• 2017

Most of vehicle detection studies using the existing general lens or wide-angle lens have a blind spot in the rear detection situation, the image is vulnerable to noise and a variety of external environments. In this paper, we propose a method that is detection in harsh external environment with noise, blind spots, etc. First, using a fish-eye lens will help minimize blind spots compared to the wide-angle lens. When angle of the lens is growing because nonlinear radial distortion also increase, calibration was used after initializing and optimizing the distortion constant in order to ensure accuracy. In addition, the original image was analyzed along with calibration to remove fog and calibrate brightness and thereby enable detection even when visibility is obstructed due to light and dark adaptations from foggy situations or sudden changes in illumination. Fog removal generally takes a considerably significant amount of time to calculate. Thus in order to reduce the calculation time, remove the fog used the major fog removal algorithm Dark Channel Prior. While Gamma Correction was used to calibrate brightness, a brightness and contrast evaluation was conducted on the image in order to determine the Gamma Value needed for correction. The evaluation used only a part instead of the entirety of the image in order to reduce the time allotted to calculation. When the brightness and contrast values were calculated, those values were used to decided Gamma value and to correct the entire image. The brightness correction and fog removal were processed in parallel, and the images were registered as a single image to minimize the calculation time needed for all the processes. Then the feature extraction method HOG was used to detect the vehicle in the corrected image. As a result, it took 0.064 seconds per frame to detect the vehicle using image correction as proposed herein, which showed a 7.5% improvement in detection rate compared to the existing vehicle detection method.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.155-166
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• 2021

Most object detection algorithms are studied based on RGB images. Because the RGB cameras are capturing images based on light, however, the object detection performance is poor when the light condition is not good, e.g., at night or foggy days. On the other hand, high-quality infrared(IR) images regardless of weather condition and light can be acquired because IR images are captured by an IR sensor that makes images with heat information. In this paper, we performed the object detection algorithm based on the compression ratio in RGB and IR images to show the detection capabilities. We selected RGB and IR images that were taken at night from the Free FLIR Thermal dataset for the ADAS(Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) research. We used the pre-trained object detection network for RGB images and a fine-tuned network that is tuned based on night RGB and IR images. Experimental results show that higher object detection performance can be acquired using IR images than using RGB images in both networks.