• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.32-40
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• 2022

Underwater optical images face various limitations that degrade the image quality compared with optical images taken in our atmosphere. Attenuation according to the wavelength of light and reflection by very small floating objects cause low contrast, blurry clarity, and color degradation in underwater images. We constructed an image data of the Korean sea and enhanced it by learning the characteristics of underwater images using the deep learning techniques of CycleGAN (cycle-consistent adversarial network), UGAN (underwater GAN), FUnIE-GAN (fast underwater image enhancement GAN). In addition, the underwater optical image was enhanced using the image processing technique of Image Fusion. For a quantitative performance comparison, UIQM (underwater image quality measure), which evaluates the performance of the enhancement in terms of colorfulness, sharpness, and contrast, and UCIQE (underwater color image quality evaluation), which evaluates the performance in terms of chroma, luminance, and saturation were calculated. For 100 underwater images taken in Korean seas, the average UIQMs of CycleGAN, UGAN, and FUnIE-GAN were 3.91, 3.42, and 2.66, respectively, and the average UCIQEs were measured to be 29.9, 26.77, and 22.88, respectively. The average UIQM and UCIQE of Image Fusion were 3.63 and 23.59, respectively. CycleGAN and UGAN qualitatively and quantitatively improved the image quality in various underwater environments, and FUnIE-GAN had performance differences depending on the underwater environment. Image Fusion showed good performance in terms of color correction and sharpness enhancement. It is expected that this method can be used for monitoring underwater works and the autonomous operation of unmanned vehicles by improving the visibility of underwater situations more accurately.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.238-244
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• 2021

Image mosaicking is a common and useful technique to visualize a global map by stitching a large number of local images obtained from visual surveys in underwater environments. In particular, visual inspection of underwater structures using underwater robots can be a potential application for image mosaicking. Feature-based pairwise image registration is a commonly employed process in most image mosaicking algorithms to estimate visual odometry information between compared images. However, visual features are not always uniformly distributed on the surface of underwater structures, and thus the performance of image registration can vary significantly, which results in unnecessary computations in image matching for poor-conditioned image pairs. This study proposes a pairwise registrability measure to select informative image pairs and to improve the overall computational efficiency of underwater image mosaicking algorithms. The validity and effectiveness of the image mosaicking algorithm considering the pairwise registrability are demonstrated using an experimental dataset obtained with a full-scale ship in a real sea environment.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.2552-2570
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• 2022

Underwater images usually have various problems, such as the color cast of underwater images due to the attenuation of different lights in water, the darkness of image caused by the lack of light underwater, and the haze effect of underwater images because of the scattering of light. To address the above problems, the channel attention mechanism, strengthen-operate-subtract (SOS) boosting mechanism and gated fusion module are introduced in our paper, based on which, an underwater image recovery network is proposed. First, for the color cast problem of underwater images, the channel attention mechanism is incorporated in our model, which can well alleviate the color cast of underwater images. Second, as for the darkness of underwater images, the similarity between the target underwater image after dehazing and color correcting, and the image output by our model is used as the loss function, so as to increase the brightness of the underwater image. Finally, we employ the SOS boosting module to eliminate the haze effect of underwater images. Moreover, experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of our model. The qualitative analysis results show that our method can be applied to effectively recover the underwater images, which outperformed most methods for comparison according to various criteria in the quantitative analysis.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.442-453
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• 2020

Underwater color images suffer from low visibility and color cast effects caused by light attenuation by water and floating particles. This study applied single image enhancement techniques to enhance the quality of underwater images and compared their performance with real underwater images taken in Korean waters. Dark channel prior (DCP), gradient transform, image fusion, and generative adversarial networks (GAN), such as cycleGAN and underwater GAN (UGAN), were considered for single image enhancement. Their performance was evaluated in terms of underwater image quality measure, underwater color image quality evaluation, gray-world assumption, and blur metric. The DCP saturated the underwater images to a specific greenish or bluish color tone and reduced the brightness of the background signal. The gradient transform method with two transmission maps were sensitive to the light source and highlighted the region exposed to light. Although image fusion enabled reasonable color correction, the object details were lost due to the last fusion step. CycleGAN corrected overall color tone relatively well but generated artifacts in the background. UGAN showed good visual quality and obtained the highest scores against all figures of merit (FOMs) by compensating for the colors and visibility compared to the other single enhancement methods.

• Journal of Conservation Science
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.312-321
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• 2021

Underwater archaeology relies heavily on photography and video image recording during surveillances and excavations like ordinary archaeological studies on land. All underwater images suffer poor image quality and distortions due to poor visibility, low contrast and blur, caused by differences in refractive indices of water and air, properties of selected lenses and shapes of viewports. In the Yellow Sea (between mainland China and the Korean peninsula), the visibility underwater is far less than 1 m, typically in the range of 30 cm to 50 cm, on even a clear day, due to very high turbidity. For photographing 1 m x 1 m grids underwater, a very wide view angle (180°) fisheye lens with an 8 mm focal length is intentionally used despite unwanted severe barrel-shaped image distortion, even with a dome port camera housing. It is very difficult to map wide underwater archaeological excavation sites by combining severely distorted images. Development of practical compensation methods for distorted underwater images acquired through the fisheye lens is strongly desired. In this study, the source of image distortion in underwater photography is investigated. We have identified the source of image distortion as the mismatching, in optical axis and focal points, between dome port housing and fisheye lens. A practical image distortion compensation method, using customized image processing software, was explored and verified using archived underwater excavation images for effectiveness in underwater archaeological applications. To minimize unusable area due to severe distortion after distortion compensation, practical underwater photography guidelines are suggested.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.3
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• pp.91-98
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• 2016

Detection and classification of underwater objects in sonar imagery are challenging problems. This paper proposes a system that detects and identifies underwater objects at the sea floor level using a sonar image and image processing techniques. The identification process of underwater objects consists of two steps; detection of candidate regions and identification of underwater objects. The candidate regions of underwater objects are extracted by image registration through the detection of common feature points between the reference background image and the current scanning image. And then, underwater objects are identified as the closest pattern within the database using eigenvectors and eigenvalues as features. The proposed system is expected to be used in efficient securement of Q route in vessel navigation.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.544-564
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• 2022

Underwater images often suffer from color distortion, blurring and low contrast, which is caused by the propagation of light in the underwater environment being affected by the two processes: absorption and scattering. To cope with the poor quality of underwater images, this paper proposes a multiscale fusion underwater image enhancement method based on channel attention mechanism and local binary pattern (LBP). The network consists of three modules: feature aggregation, image reconstruction and LBP enhancement. The feature aggregation module aggregates feature information at different scales of the image, and the image reconstruction module restores the output features to high-quality underwater images. The network also introduces channel attention mechanism to make the network pay more attention to the channels containing important information. The detail information is protected by real-time superposition with feature information. Experimental results demonstrate that the method in this paper produces results with correct colors and complete details, and outperforms existing methods in quantitative metrics.

• Ocean Systems Engineering
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.217-231
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• 2016

This paper presents a new approach for underwater image analysis using the bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) technique and the phase congruency information. The BEMD algorithm, fully unsupervised, it is mainly applied to texture extraction and image filtering, which are widely recognized as a difficult and challenging machine vision problem. The phase information is the very stability feature of image. Recent developments in analysis methods on the phase congruency information have received large attention by the image researchers. In this paper, the proposed method is called the EP model that inherits the advantages of the first two algorithms, so this model is suitable for processing underwater image. Moreover, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is presented in this paper to solve the problem that the threshold is greatly affected by personal experience when underwater image edge detection is performed using the EP model. The EP images are computed using combinations of the Canny detector parameters, and the binaryzation image results are generated accordingly. The ideal EP edge feature extractive maps are estimated using correspondence threshold which is optimized by ROC analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to avoid the operation error caused by manual setting of the detection threshold, and to adaptively set the image feature detection threshold. The proposed method has been proved to be accuracy and effectiveness by the underwater image processing examples.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.150-160
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• 2008

The present domestic underwater and ocean facilities management depends on analysis with the naked eye. This study performs quantitative analysis to improve conventional methods, analyze spatial situation of underwater facilities. This research is divided into two steps; underwater image distortion correction and image mosaic step. First, underwater image distortion correction step is for the production of underwater target, calculates the correction parameters, and then developed the method that convert the original image point to whose distortion is corrected. Second step is for the obtaining pipe images installed in the underwater, corrects the distortion, and then transforms a coordinates of the correction pipe image. After coordinate transformation, we make the mosaic image using the singularities. As a result, when we measure the distance between pipe and underwater ground and compare with calculation value on mosaic image, it is showed that RMSE is 0.3cm.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.837-856
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• 2016

Underwater image enhancement has received considerable attention in last decades, due to the nature of poor visibility and low contrast of underwater images. In this paper, we propose a new automatic underwater image enhancement algorithm, which combines nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain enhancement techniques with the mechanism of the human visual system (HVS). We apply the multiscale retinex algorithm based on the HVS into NSCT domain in order to eliminate the non-uniform illumination, and adopt the threshold denoising technique to suppress underwater noise. Our proposed algorithm incorporates the luminance masking and contrast masking characteristics of the HVS into NSCT domain to yield the new HVS-based NSCT. Moreover, we define two nonlinear mapping functions. The first one is used to manipulate the HVS-based NSCT contrast coefficients to enhance the edges. The second one is a gain function which modifies the lowpass subband coefficients to adjust the global dynamic range. As a result, our algorithm can achieve contrast enhancement, image denoising and edge sharpening automatically and simultaneously. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed algorithm has better enhancement performance than state-of-the-art algorithms both in subjective evaluation and quantitative assessment. In addition, our algorithm can automatically achieve underwater image enhancement without any parameter tuning.