• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39A no.8
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• pp.459-466
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• 2014

Fading effect of old pictures and printings is shown up differently according to the ink property, temperature, humidity, illuminants, and so on. Faded image enhancement techniques based on illuminant estimation are proposed such as the gray world algorithm and white patch retinex methods. However, conventional simple operators are not suitable for enhancing faded images because partial fading effect is appeared differently. Thus, this paper presents a color enhancement algorithm based on integrating correction coefficients for faded images. First, the proposed method adopts local process by using multi-scale average mask. The coefficients for each multi-scale average mask are obtained to apply the gray world algorithm. Then, integrating the coefficients with weights is performed to calculate correction ratio for red and blue channels in the gray world assumption. Finally, the enhanced image is obtained by applying the integrated coefficients to the gray world algorithm. In the experimental results, the proposed method reproduces better colors for both wholly and partially faded images compared with the previous methods.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.535-546
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• 2010

Digital images have undesired color casts due to various illumination conditions and intrinsic characteristics of cameras. Since the color casts in the images deteriorate performance of color representations, color correction is required for further analysis of images. In this paper, an algorithm for detection and removal of color casts is presented. The proposed algorithm consists of four steps: retrieving similar image using color by correlation, extraction of near neutral color regions, kernel density estimation, and removal of color casts. Ambiguities in near neutral color regions are excluded based on kernel density estimation by the color by correlation algorithm. The method determines whether there are color casts by chromaticity distributions in near neutral color regions, and removes color casts for color constancy. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method outperforms the gray world algorithm and the color by correlation algorithm.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2006.04a
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• pp.27-29
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose a new method of automatic white balance which is one of the image signal processing techniques. Our method is conceptually based on gray world assumption. However, while previous methods generate linear results as multiplying pixel values by a gain, our method generates non-linear results using the feature of B-Spline curves. The two merits of deriving non-linear results are preventing AWB failure from transforming strong color of high level into wrong color and well preserving original contrast of an input image.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.117-126
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• 2003

GA(genetic algorithm) has a powerful searching ability and is comparatively easy to use and to apply as well. By that reason, GA is in the spotlight these days as an optimization skill for mechanical systems.$^1$However, GA has a low efficiency caused by a huge amount of repetitive computation and an inefficiency that GA meanders near the optimum. It also can be shown a phenomenon such as genetic drifting which converges to a wrong solution.$^{8}$ These defects are the reasons why GA is not widdy applied to real world problems. However, the low efficiency problem and the meandering problem of GA can be overcomed by introducing parallel computation$^{7}$ and gray code$^4$, respectively. Standard GA(SGA)$^{9}$ works fine on small to medium scale problems. However, SGA done not work well for large-scale problems. Large-scale problems with more than 500-bit of sere's have never been tested and published in papers. In the result of using the SGA, the powerful searching ability of SGA doesn't have no effect on optimizing the problem that has 96 design valuables and 1536 bits of gene's length. So it converges to a solution which is not considered as a global optimum. Therefore, this study proposes ExpGA(experience GA) which is a new genetic algorithm made by applying a new probability parameter called by the experience value. Furthermore, this study finds the solution throughout the whole field searching, with applying ExpGA which is a optimization technique for the structure having genetic drifting by the standard GA and not making a optimization close to the best fitted value. In addition to them, this study also makes a research about the possibility of GA as a optimization technique of large-scale design variable problems.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.392-400
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• 2001

This paper proposes an illuminant estimation algorithm that estimates the spectral power distribution of an incident light source from a single image. The proposed illumination recovery procedure has two phases. First, the surface spectral reflectances are recovered in the maximum achromatic region (MAR) which is the most achromatic and highly bright region of an image after removing partially the effect of illumination using a modified gray world algorithm. Here, the surface reflectances of MAR are estimated using the principal component analysis method along with a set of given 1269 Munsell samples. Second, the Population of reflected lights is determined with 1269 Munsell samples and a set of illuminations then the spectral distribution of re(looted lights of MAR is selected from the spectral database. That is, color differences are compared between the reflected lights of the MAR and the spectral database, which is the set of reflected lights built by the given set of Munsell samples and illuminants. Then the closest colors from the spectral database are selected. Finally, the illuminant of an image can be calculated dividing the average spectral distributions of reflected lights of MAR by the average surface reflectances of the MAR. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm, experiments with artificial scenes, which are exposed to chromatic illuminants, were performed and the spectral distribution of estimated illumination and color difference are compared with results of the conventional method.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.9B no.1
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• pp.119-128
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• 2002

This paper proposes an efficient recognition method of car license plate from the car images by using both the dynamical thresholding and the neural network with enhanced learning algorithm. The car license plate is extracted by the dynamical thresholding based on the structural features and the density rates. Each characters and numbers from the p]ate is also extracted by the contour tracking algorithm. The enhanced neural network is proposed for recognizing them, which has the algorithm of combining the modified ART1 and the supervised learning method. The proposed method has applied to the real-world car images. The simulation results show that the proposed method has better the extraction rates than the methods with information of the gray brightness and the RGB, respectively. And the proposed method has better recognition performance than the conventional backpropagation neural network.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.897-904
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• 2005

Face Recognition has been an active research area because it is not difficult to acquire face image data and it is applicable in wide range area in real world. Due to the high dimensionality of a face image space, however, it is not easy to process the face images. In this paper, we propose a method to reduce the dimension of the facial data and extract the features from them. It will be solved using the method which extracts the features from holistic face images. The proposed algorithm consists of two parts. The first is the using of principal component analysis (PCA) to transform three dimensional color facial images to one dimensional gray facial images. The second is integrated linear discriminant analusis (PCA+LDA) to prevent the loss of informations in case of performing separated steps. Integrated LDA is integrated algorithm of PCA for reduction of dimension and LDA for discrimination of facial vectors. First, in case of transformation from color image to gray image, PCA(Principal Component Analysis) is performed to enhance the image contrast to raise the recognition rate. Second, integrated LDA(Linear Discriminant Analysis) combines the two steps, namely PCA for dimensionality reduction and LDA for discrimination. It makes possible to describe concise algorithm expression and to prevent the information loss in separate steps. To validate the proposed method, the algorithm is implemented and tested on well controlled face databases.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.97-107
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• 2001

In this paper, an illuminant estimation algorithm of a chromatic digital images proposed. The proposed illumination estimation method has two phases. First, the surface spectral reflectances are recovered. In this case, the surface spectral reflectances recovered are limited to the maximum highlight region (MHR) which is the most achromatic and highly bright region of an image after applying intermediate color constancy process using a modified gray world algorithm. Next, the surface reflectances of the maximum highlight region are estimated using the principal component analysis method along with a set of given Munsell samples. Second, the spectral distribution of reflected lights of MHR is selected from the spectral database. That is a color difference is compared between the reflected lights of the MHR and the spectral database that is the set of reflected lights built by the given Munsell samples and a set of illuminants. Then the closest colors from the spectral database are selected. Finally, the illuminant of an image can be calculated dividing the average spectral distributions of reflected lights of MHR by the average surface reflectances of the MHR. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm, experiments with artificial and real captured color-biased scenes were performed and numerical comparison examined. The proposed method was effective in estimating the spectral of the given illuminant sunder various illuminants.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2013

It is a challenging problem to most of the image processing when the light source is unknown. The color of the light source must be estimated in order to compensate color changes. To estimate the color of the light source, additional assumption is need, so that we assumed color distribution according to the light source. If the pixels, which do not satisfy the assumption, are used, the estimation fails to provide an accurate result. The most popular color distribution assumption is Grey-World Assumption (GWA); it is the assumption that the color in each scene, the surface reflectance averages to gray or achromatic color over the entire images. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of the camera response function, and the effect of the Grey-World Assumption on the pixel value and chromaticity, based on the inherent characteristics of the light source. Besides, we propose a novel method that detects important pixels for the color estimation of the light source. In our method, we firstly proposed a method that gives weights to pixels satisfying the assumption. Then, we proposed a pixel detection method, which we modified max-RGB method, to apply on the weighted pixels. Maximum weighted pixels in the column direction and row direction in one channel are detected. The performance of our method is verified through demonstrations in several real scenes. Proposed method better accurately estimate the color of the light than previous methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.39-46
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• 2001

In this paper we propose a new method that can be estimation the spectral power distribution of the light source from three-band images. the light source is estimated by dividing the reflected spectral power distribution of the maximum achromatic region(L(λ)) by the corresponding surface reflectance(Ο(λ)). In order to obtain reflected spectral power distribution of the maximum achromatic region from three-bend images, a modified gray world assumption algorithm is adapted. And the maximum surface reflectance is estimated using the principal component analysis method along with achromatic population. The achromatic population is created from a set of given Munsell color chips whose chroma vector is less than threshold. Cumulative contribution ratio of principal components from the first to the third for classified achromatic population was about 99.75%. The reconstruction of illumination spectral power distribution by using achromatic population and three-band digital images captured under various light source was examined, and evaluated by RMSE between the original and reconstructed illumination spectral power distribution. This work was supported by grant No (2000-1-30200-005-3) from the Basic Research Program of the Korea Science & Engineering Foundation.