• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.333-338
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• 2000

In this paper, an automated segmentation algorithm is proposed for MR brain images using T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and PD images complementarily. The proposed segmentation algorithm is composed of 3 step. In the first step, cerebrum images are extracted by putting a cerebrum mask upon the three input images. In the second step, outstanding clusters that represent inner tissues of the cerebrum are chosen among 3-dimensional(3D) clusters. 3D clusters are determined by intersecting densely distributed parts of 2D histogram in the 3D space formed with three optimal scale images. Optimal scale image is made up of applying scale space filtering to each 2D histogram and searching graph structure. Optimal scale image best describes the shape of densely distributed parts of pixels in 2D histogram and searching graph structure. Optimal scale image best describes the shape of densely distributed parts of pixels in 2D histogram. In the final step, cerebrum images are segmented using FCM algorithm with its initial centroid value as the outstanding clusters centroid value. The proposed cluster's centroid accurately. And also can get better segmentation results from the proposed segmentation algorithm with multi spectral analysis than the method of single spectral analysis.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.54-61
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• 2009

This paper proposes a skin segmentation method based on region histograms of the color quantization map. First, we make a quantization map of the image using the JSEG algorithm and detect the skin pixel. For the skin region detection, the similar neighboring regions are set by its similarity of the size and location between the previous frame and the present frame from the each region of the color quantization map. Then we compare the similarity of histogram between the color distributions of each quantized region and the skin color model using the histogram distance. We select the skin region by the threshold value calculated automatically. The skin model is updated by the skin color information from the selected result. The proposed algorithm was compared with previous algorithms on the ECHO database and the continuous images captured under time varying illumination for adaptation test. Our approach shows better performance than previous approaches on skin color segmentation and adaptation to varying illumination.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.31-37
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• 2015

Symmetry is easily found in animals and plants as well as in artificial structures. It is useful not only for human cognitive process but also for image understanding by computer. Application areas include face detection and recognition, indexing of image database, image segmentation and detection, and analysis of medical images. The method used in this paper extracts edges, and the perpendicular bisector of any pair of selected edge points is considered to be a candidate axis of symmetry. The coefficients of the perpendicular bisectors are accumulated in the coefficient space. Axis of symmetry is determined to be the line for which the histogram has maximum value. This method shows good results, but the usefulness of the method is restricted because the amount of computation increases proportional to the square of the number of edges. In this paper, an acceleration method is proposed which performs $2^{2n}$ times faster than the original one. Experiment on 20 test images shows that the proposed method using level-3 image segmentation performs 63.9 times faster than the original method.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.608-617
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• 2017

Methods of contrast enhancement have problem such as side effect of over-enhancement with non-gaussian histogram distribution, tradeoff enhancement efficiency against brightness preserving. In order to enhance contrast at various histogram distribution, segmentation to region with gaussian distribution and then enhance contrast each region. First, we segment an image into several regions using GMM(Gaussian Mixture Model)fitting by that k-mean clustering and EM(Expectation-Maximization) in $L^*a^*b^*$ color space. As a result region segmentation, we get the region map and probability map. Then we apply local contrast enhancement algorithm that mean shift to minimum overlapping of each region and preserve brightness histogram equalization. Experiment result show that proposed region based contrast enhancement method compare to the conventional method as AMBE(AbsoluteMean Brightness Error) and AE(Average Entropy), brightness is maintained and represented detail information.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.453-456
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• 2003

Compared with other features of the image, color features are less sensitive to noise and background complication. Besides, this adding to object segmentation has more accuracy of image retrieval. This paper presents object segmentation and HAQ(Histogram Analysis and Quantization) algorithm approach to extract features(the object information and the characteristic colors) of an image. The empirical results shows that this method presents exactly spatial and color information of an image as image retrieval's feature.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.39-46
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• 2012

Character segmentation is a preprocessing step in many offline handwriting recognition systems. In this paper, Chinese characters are categorized into seven different structures. In each structure, the character size with the range of variations is estimated considering typical handwritten samples. The component removal and merge criteria are presented to remove punctuation symbols or to merge small components which are part of a character. Finally, the criteria for segmenting the adjacent characters concerning each other or overlapped are proposed.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.117-140
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• 2013

Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India, with more than 300 million speakers. As there is no separation between the characters of texts written in Hindi as there is in English, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems developed for the Hindi language carry a very poor recognition rate. In this paper we propose an OCR for printed Hindi text in Devanagari script, using Artificial Neural Network (ANN), which improves its efficiency. One of the major reasons for the poor recognition rate is error in character segmentation. The presence of touching characters in the scanned documents further complicates the segmentation process, creating a major problem when designing an effective character segmentation technique. Preprocessing, character segmentation, feature extraction, and finally, classification and recognition are the major steps which are followed by a general OCR. The preprocessing tasks considered in the paper are conversion of gray scaled images to binary images, image rectification, and segmentation of the document's textual contents into paragraphs, lines, words, and then at the level of basic symbols. The basic symbols, obtained as the fundamental unit from the segmentation process, are recognized by the neural classifier. In this work, three feature extraction techniques-: histogram of projection based on mean distance, histogram of projection based on pixel value, and vertical zero crossing, have been used to improve the rate of recognition. These feature extraction techniques are powerful enough to extract features of even distorted characters/symbols. For development of the neural classifier, a back-propagation neural network with two hidden layers is used. The classifier is trained and tested for printed Hindi texts. A performance of approximately 90% correct recognition rate is achieved.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.368-374
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• 2010

Image segmentation is the basic step in the field of the image processing for pattern recognition, environment recognition, and context analysis. The Otsu's automatic threshold selection, which determines the optimal threshold value to maximize the between class scatter using the distribution information of the normalized histogram of a image, is the famous method among the various image segmentation methods. For the automatic threshold selection proposed by Otsu, it is difficult to determine the optimal threshold value by considering the sub-region characteristic of the image because the Otsu's algorithm analyzes the global histogram of a image. In this paper, to alleviate this difficulty of Otsu's image segmentation algorithm and to improve image segmentation capability, the original image is divided into several sub-images by using context fuzzy c-means algorithm. The proposed fuzzy Otsu threshold algorithm is applied to the divided sub-images and the several threshold values are obtained.

• Clinical Endoscopy
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.390-400
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• 2022

Background/Aims: Previous artificial intelligence (AI) models attempting to segment gastric intestinal metaplasia (GIM) areas have failed to be deployed in real-time endoscopy due to their slow inference speeds. Here, we propose a new GIM segmentation AI model with inference speeds faster than 25 frames per second that maintains a high level of accuracy. Methods: Investigators from Chulalongkorn University obtained 802 histological-proven GIM images for AI model training. Four strategies were proposed to improve the model accuracy. First, transfer learning was employed to the public colon datasets. Second, an image preprocessing technique contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization was employed to produce clearer GIM areas. Third, data augmentation was applied for a more robust model. Lastly, the bilateral segmentation network model was applied to segment GIM areas in real time. The results were analyzed using different validity values. Results: From the internal test, our AI model achieved an inference speed of 31.53 frames per second. GIM detection showed sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive, negative predictive, accuracy, and mean intersection over union in GIM segmentation values of 93%, 80%, 82%, 92%, 87%, and 57%, respectively. Conclusions: The bilateral segmentation network combined with transfer learning, contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization, and data augmentation can provide high sensitivity and good accuracy for GIM detection and segmentation.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2004.08c
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• pp.867-871
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• 2004

In this paper, a new analytic approach for shape preserving contrast enhancement is presented. Contrast enhancement is achieved by means of segmental histogram stretching modification which preserves the given image shape, not distorting the original shape. After global stretching, the image is partitioned into several level-sets according to threshold condition. The image information of each level-set is represented as typical value based on grouped differential values. The basic property is modified into common local schemes, thereby introducing the enhanced effect through extreme discrimination between subsets. The scheme is based on stretching the histogram of subsets in which the intensity gray levels between connected pixels are approximately same In spite of histogram widening, stretched by local image information, it neither creates nor destroys the original image, thereby preserving image shape and enhancing the contrast. By designing local histogram stretching operations, we can preserve the original shape of level-sets of the image, and also enhance the global intensity. Thus it can hold the main properties of both global and local image schemes, which leads to versatile applications in the field of digital epigraphy.