• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.2287-2312
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• 2018

Extracting key visual information from images containing natural scene is a challenging task and an important step for the visually impaired to recognize information based on tactile graphics. In this study, a novel method is proposed for extracting salient regions based on global contrast enhancement and saliency cuts in order to improve the process of recognizing images for the visually impaired. To accomplish this, an image enhancement technique is applied to natural scene images, and a saliency map is acquired to measure the color contrast of homogeneous regions against other areas of the image. The saliency maps also help automatic salient region extraction, referred to as saliency cuts, and assist in obtaining a binary mask of high quality. Finally, outer boundaries and inner edges are detected in images with natural scene to identify edges that are visually significant. Experimental results indicate that the method we propose in this paper extracts salient objects effectively and achieves remarkable performance compared to conventional methods. Our method offers benefits in extracting salient objects and generating simple but important edges from images containing natural scene and for providing information to the visually impaired.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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• 2007.04a
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• pp.153-156
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• 2007

인간의 시각 시스템은 선택적 주의 집중에 의해 시각 수용체로 도달되는 많은 물체들 중에서 필요한 정보만을 추출하여 원하는 작업을 수행한다. Itti와 Koch는 시각적 주의를 제어할 수 있는, 신경계를 모방한 계산적 모델을 제안하였으나 조명환경에 고정적인 saliency map을 구성하였다. 따라서, 본 논문에서는 영상에서 ROI(region of interest)을 탐지하기 위한 조명환경에 적응적인 saliency map 모델을 구성하는 기법을 제시한다. 변화하는 환경에서 원하는 특징을 부각시키기 위하여 상황에 적응적인 동적 가중치를 부여한다. 동적 가중치는 conspicuity map에 S.K. Chang이 제안한 PIM(Picture Information Measure)을 적용시켜 정보량을 측정한 후, 이에 따라 정규화된 값을 부여함으로써 구현한다. 제안하는 조명환경에 강인한 적응적인 saliency map 모델 구현의 성능을 얼굴검출 실험을 통하여 검증하였다.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.965-970
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• 2013

It is important work to extract saliency regions from an image as preprocessing for various image processing methods. In this paper, we introduce an improved method to estimate saliency value of each pixel from an image. The proposed method is an improved work of the previously studied method using color and statistical framework to estimate saliency values. At first, saliency value of each pixel is calculated using the local contrast of an image region at various scales and the most significant saliency pixel is determined using saliency value of each pixel. Then, saliency value of each pixel is again estimated using gauss weight with respect to the most significant saliency pixel and the saliency of each pixel is determined to calculate initial probability. At last, the saliency value of each pixel is calculated by Bayes' rule. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the current statistical based method.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.211-217
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• 2012

Conventional GrabCut algorithm is semi-automatic algorithm that user must be set rectangle window surrounds the object. This paper studied automatic object detection to solve these problem by detecting salient region based on Human Visual System. Saliency map is computed using Lab color space which is based on color opposing theory of 'red-green' and 'blue-yellow'. Then Saliency Points are computed from the boundaries of Low-Frequency region that are extracted from Saliency Map. Finally, Rectangle windows are obtained from coordinate value of Saliency Points and these windows are used in GrabCut algorithm to extract objects. Through various experiments, the proposed algorithm computing rectangle windows of salient region and extracting objects has been proved.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.55-58
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• 2011

In this paper we introduce an improved method to measure saliency values of pixels from an image. The proposed saliency measure is formulated using local features of color and a statistical framework. In the preprocessing step, rough salient pixels are determined as the local contrast of an image region with respect to its neighborhood at various scales. Then, the saliency value of each pixel is calculated by Bayes' rule using rough salient pixels. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the current Bayes' rule based method.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.131-139
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• 2008

This paper presents a new saliency map which is constructed by providing dynamic weights on individual features in an input image to search ROI(Region Of Interest) or FOA(Focus Of Attention). To construct a saliency map on there is no a priori information, three feature-maps are constructed first which emphasize orientation, color, and intensity of individual pixels, respectively. From feature-maps, conspicuity maps are generated by using the It's algorithm and their information quantities are measured in terms of entropy. Final saliency map is constructed by summing the conspicuity maps weighted with their individual entropies. The prominency of the proposed algorithm has been proved by showing that the ROIs detected by the proposed algorithm in ten different images are similar with those selected by one-hundred person's naked eyes.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.17B no.3
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• pp.239-248
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• 2010

Leukocyte in blood smear image provides significant information to doctors for diagnosis of patient health status. Therefore, it is necessary step to separate leukocyte from blood smear image among various blood cells for early disease prediction. In this paper, we present a saliency map and stepwise region merging based leukocyte segmentation method. Since leukocyte region has salient color and texture, we create a saliency map using these feature map. Saliency map is used for sub-image separation. Then, clustering is performed on each sub-image using mean-shift. After mean-shift is applied, stepwise region-merging is applied to particle clusters to obtain final leukocyte nucleus. The experimental results show that our system can indeed improve segmentation performance compared to previous researches with average accuracy rate of 71%.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.1155-1172
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• 2015

In this paper, we propose a novel saliency detection framework based on illumination invariant features to improve the accuracy of the saliency detection under the different light conditions. The proposed algorithm is divided into three steps. First, we extract the illuminant invariant features to reduce the effect of the illumination based on the local sensitive histograms. Second, a preliminary saliency map is obtained in the CIE Lab color space. Last, we use the region growing method to fuse the illuminant invariant features and the preliminary saliency map into a new framework. In addition, we integrate the information of spatial distinctness since the saliency objects are usually compact. The experiments on the benchmark dataset show that the proposed saliency detection framework outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of different illuminants in the images.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.133-142
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• 2012

This paper presents a salient region detection algorithm for auto-focusing based on the characteristics of a human's visual attention. To describe the saliency at the local, regional, and global levels, this paper proposes a set of novel features including multi-scale local contrast, variance, center-surround entropy, and closeness to the center. Those features are then prioritized to produce a saliency map. The major advantage of the proposed approach is twofold; i) robustness to changes in focus and ii) low computational complexity. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms the existing low-level feature-based methods in the sense of both robustness and accuracy for auto-focusing.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.592-601
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• 2013

Object segmentation is a challenging task in image processing and computer vision. In this paper, we present a visual attention based segmentation method to segment small sized interesting objects in natural images. Different from the traditional methods, we first search the region of interest by using our novel saliency-based method, which is mainly based on band-pass filtering, to obtain the appropriate frequency. Secondly, we applied the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to locate the object region. By incorporating the visual attention analysis into object segmentation, our proposed approach is able to narrow the search region for object segmentation, so that the accuracy is increased and the computational complexity is reduced. The experimental results indicate that our proposed approach is efficient for object segmentation in natural images, especially for small objects. Our proposed method significantly outperforms traditional GMM based segmentation.