• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.1100-1105
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• 2006

Severe distortions of colors in the obtained images have made it difficult for color codes to expand their applications. To reduce the effect of color distortions on reading colors, it will be more desirable to statistically process as many pixels in the individual color region as possible, than relying on some regularly sampled pixels. This process may require segmentation, which usually requires edge detection. However, edges in color codes can be disconnected due tovarious distortions such as zipper effect and reflection, to name a few, making segmentation incomplete. Edge linking is also a difficult process. In this paper, a more efficient approach to reducing the effect of color distortions on reading colors, one that excludes precise edge detection for segmentation, was obtained by employing the k-means clustering algorithm. And, in detecting color codes, the properties of both six safe colors and grays were utilized. Experiments were conducted on 144, 4M-pixel, outdoor images. The proposed method resulted in a color-code detection rate of 100% fur the test images, and an average color-reading accuracy of over 99% for the detected codes, while the highest accuracy that could be achieved with an approach employing Canny edge detection was 91.28%.