Recently, a lot of low-light image enhancement methods have been proposed. However, these methods have some problems such as causing fine details lost in bright regions and/or unnatural color tones. In this paper, we propose a new low-light image enhancement method to cope with these problems. In the proposed method, a pixel is represented by a convex combination of white, black, and pure color. Then, an equi-hue plane in RGB color space is represented as a triangle whose vertices correspond to white, black, and pure color. The visibility of low-light image is improved by applying a modified gamma transform to the combination coefficients on an equi-hue plane in RGB color space. The contrast of the image is enhanced by the histogram specification method using the histogram smoothed by a filter with a kernel determined based on a gamma distribution. In the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the comparison with the state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement methods.

Since the dark channel prior (DCP)-based dehazing method is ineffective in the sky area and will cause the problem of too dark and color distortion of the image, we propose a novel dehazing method based on sky area segmentation and image fusion. We first segment the image according to the characteristics of the sky area and non-sky area of the image, then estimate the atmospheric light and transmission map according to the DCP and correct them, and then fuse the original image after the contrast adaptive histogram equalization to improve the details information of the image. Experiments illustrate that our method performs well in dehazing and can reduce image distortion.

Histogram equalization (HE) is the one of the simplest and most effective methods for contrast enhancement. It can automatically define the gray-level mapping function based on the distribution of gray-level included in the image. However, since HE does not use a spatial feature included in the input image, HE fails to produce satisfactory results for broad range of low-contrast images. The differential gray-level histogram (DH), which is contained edge information of the input image, was defined and the differential gray-level histogram equalization (DHE) has been proposed. The DHE shows better enhancement results compared to HE for many kinds of images. In this paper, we propose a generalized histogram equalization (GHE) including HE and DHE. In GHE, the histogram is created using the power of the differential gray-level, which includes the spatial features of the image. In HE, the mean brightness of the enhancement image cannot be controlled. On the other hand, GHE can control the mean brightness of the enhancement image by changing the power, thus, the mean brightness of the input image can be perfectly preserved while maintaining good contrast enhancement.

When collecting images, owing to the influence of shooting equipment, shooting environment, and other factors, often low-illumination images with insufficient exposure are obtained. For low-illumination images, it is necessary to improve the contrast. In this paper, a digital color image contrast enhancement method based on luminance weight adjustment is proposed. This method improves the contrast of the image and maintains the detail and nature of the image. In the proposed method, the illumination of the histogram equalization image and the adaptive gamma correction with weighted distribution image are adjusted by the luminance weight of w1 to obtain a detailed image of the bright areas. Thereafter, the suppressed multi-scale retinex (MSR) is used to process the input image and obtain a detailed image of the dark areas. Finally, the luminance weight w2 is used to adjust the illumination component of the detailed images of the bright and dark areas, respectively, to obtain the output image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can enhance the details of the input image and avoid excessive enhancement of contrast, which maintains the naturalness of the input image well. Furthermore, we used the discrete entropy and lightness order error function to perform a numerical evaluation to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Recently, visual trackers based on the framework of kernelized correlation filter (KCF) achieve the robustness and accuracy results. These trackers need to learn information on the object from each frame, thus the state change of the object affects the tracking performances. In order to deal with the state change, we propose a novel KCF tracker using the filter response map, namely a confidence map, and adaptive model. This method firstly takes a skipped scale pool method which utilizes variable window size at every two frames. Secondly, the location of the object is estimated using the combination of the filter response and the similarity of the luminance histogram at multiple points in the confidence map. Moreover, we use the re-detection of the multiple peaks of the confidence map to prevent the target drift and reduce the influence of illumination. Thirdly, the learning rate to obtain the model of the object is adjusted, using the filter response and the similarity of the luminance histogram, considering the state of the object. Experimentally, the proposed tracker (CFCA) achieves outstanding performance for the challenging benchmark sequence (OTB2013 and OTB2015).

We propose a reversible data hiding (RDH) method in compressible encrypted images called the encryption-then-compression (EtC) images. The proposed method allows us to not only embed a payload in encrypted images but also compress the encrypted images containing the payload. In addition, the proposed RDH method can be applied to both plain images and encrypted ones, and the payload can be extracted flexibly in the encrypted domain or from the decrypted images. Various RDH methods have been studied in the encrypted domain, but they are not considered to be two-domain data hiding, and the resultant images cannot be compressed by using image coding standards, such as JPEG-LS and JPEG 2000. In our experiment, the proposed method shows high performance in terms of lossless compression efficiency by using JPEG-LS and JPEG 2000, data hiding capacity, and marked image quality.

Gold nanoparticles (GNPs) are often used as island electrodes of single-electron (SE) devices. One of technical challenges in fabrication of SE devices with GNPs is the placement of GNPs in a nanogap between two lead electrodes. Utilization of dielectrophoresis (DEP) phenomena is one of possible solutions for this challenge, whereas the fabrication process with DEP includes stochastic aspects. In this brief paper, we present our experimental results on electric resistance of GNP arrays assembled by DEP. More than 300 pairs of electrodes were investigated under various DEP conditions by trial and error approach. We evaluated the relationship between the DEP conditions and the electric resistance of assembled GNP arrays, which would indicate possible DEP conditions for fabrication of SE devices.

In this paper we design a fast fabric defect detection framework (Fast-DDF) based on gray histogram back-projection, which adopts end to end multi-convoluted network model to realize defect classification. First, the back-projection image is established through the gray histogram on fabric image, and the closing operation and adaptive threshold segmentation method are performed to screen the impurity information and extract the defect regions. Then, the defect images segmented by the Fast-DDF are marked and normalized into the multi-layer convolutional neural network for training. Finally, in order to solve the problem of difficult adjustment of network model parameters and long training time, some strategies such as batch normalization of samples and network fine tuning are proposed. The experimental results on the TILDA database show that our method can deal with various defect types of textile fabrics. The average detection accuracy with a higher rate of 96.12% in the database of five different defects, and the single image detection speed only needs 0.72s.

As big data attracts attention in a variety of fields, research on data exploration for analyzing large-scale scientific data has gained popularity. To support exploratory analysis of scientific data, effective summarization and visualization of the target data as well as seamless cooperation with modern data management systems are in demand. In this paper, we focus on the exploration-based analysis of scientific array data, and define a spatial V-Optimal histogram to summarize it based on the notion of histograms in the database research area. We propose histogram construction approaches based on a general hierarchical partitioning as well as a more specific one, the l-grid partitioning, for effective and efficient data visualization in scientific data analysis. In addition, we implement the proposed algorithms on the state-of-the-art array DBMS, which is appropriate to process and manage scientific data. Experiments are conducted using massive evacuation simulation data in tsunami disasters, real taxi data as well as synthetic data, to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.

This letter proposes a new face sketch recognition method. Given a query sketch and face photos in a database, the proposed method first synthesizes pseudo sketches by computing the locality sensitive histogram and dense illumination invariant features from the resized face photos, then extracts discriminative features by computing histogram of averaged oriented gradients on the query sketch and pseudo sketches, and finally find a match with the shortest cosine distance in the feature space. It achieves accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art while showing much more robustness than the existing face sketch recognition methods.

Head action recognition, as a specific problem in action recognition, has been studied in this paper. Different from most existing researches, our head action recognition problem is specifically defined for the requirement of some practical applications. Based on our definition, we build a corresponding head action dataset which contains many challenging cases. For action recognition, we proposed a real-time head action recognition framework based on HOF and ELM. The framework consists of face detection based ROI determination, HOF feature extraction in ROI, and ELM based action prediction. Experiments show that our method achieves good accuracy and is efficient enough for practical applications.

Intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), which irradiates doses to a target organ, calculates the irradiation dose using the radiation treatment planning system (RTPS). The irradiation quality is ensured by verifying that the dose distribution planned by RTPS is the same as the data measured by two-dimensional (2D) detectors. Since an actual three-dimensional (3D) distribution of irradiated dose spreads complicatedly, it is different from that of RTPS. Therefore, it is preferable to evaluate by using not only RTPS, but also actual irradiation dose distribution. In this paper, in order to perform a dose-volume histogram (DVH) evaluation of the irradiation dose distribution, we propose a method of correcting the dose distribution of RTPS by using sparsely measured radial data from 2D dose detectors. And we perform a DVH evaluation of irradiation dose distribution and we show that the proposed method contributes to high-precision DVH evaluation. The experimental results show that the estimates are in good agreement with the measured data from the 2D detectors and that the peak signal to noise ratio and the structural similarity indexes of the estimates are more accurate than those of RTPS. Therefore, we present the possibility of an evaluation of the actual irradiation dose distribution using measured data in a limited observation direction.

A significant portion of computational resources of embedded systems for visual detection is dedicated to feature extraction, and this severely affects the detection accuracy and processing performance of the system. To solve this problem, we propose a feature descriptor based on histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) consisting of simple linear algebra that can extract equivalent information to the conventional HOG feature descriptor at a low computational cost. In an evaluation, a leading-edge detection algorithm with this decomposed vector HOG (DV-HOG) achieved equivalent or better detection accuracy compared with conventional HOG feature descriptors. A hardware implementation of DV-HOG occupies approximately 14.2 times smaller cell area than that of a conventional HOG implementation.

Automatically recognizing pain and estimating pain intensity is an emerging research area that has promising applications in the medical and healthcare field, and this task possesses a crucial role in the diagnosis and treatment of patients who have limited ability to communicate verbally and remains a challenge in pattern recognition. Recently, deep learning has achieved impressive results in many domains. However, deep architectures require a significant amount of labeled data for training, and they may fail to outperform conventional handcrafted features due to insufficient data, which is also the problem faced by pain detection. Furthermore, the latest studies show that handcrafted features may provide complementary information to deep-learned features; hence, combining these features may result in improved performance. Motived by the above considerations, in this paper, we propose an innovative method based on the combination of deep spatiotemporal and handcrafted features for pain intensity estimation. We use C3D, a deep 3-dimensional convolutional network that takes a continuous sequence of video frames as input, to extract spatiotemporal facial features. C3D models the appearance and motion of videos simultaneously. For handcrafted features, we propose extracting the geometric information by computing the distance between normalized facial landmarks per frame and the ones of the mean face shape, and we extract the appearance information using the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) features around normalized facial landmarks per frame. Two levels of SVRs are trained using spatiotemporal, geometric and appearance features to obtain estimation results. We tested our proposed method on the UNBC-McMaster shoulder pain expression archive database and obtained experimental results that outperform the current state-of-the-art.

A logo is a symbolic presentation that is designed not only to identify a product manufacturer but also to attract the attention of shoppers. Shoe logos are a challenging subject for automatic extraction and recognition using image analysis techniques because they have characteristics that distinguish them from those of other products; that is, there is much within-class variation in the appearance of shoe logos. In this paper, we propose an automatic extraction and recognition method for shoe logos with a wide variety of appearance using a limited number of training samples. The proposed method employs maximally stable extremal regions for the initial region extraction, an iterative algorithm for region grouping, and gradient features and a support vector machine for logo recognition. The results of performance evaluation experiments using a logo dataset that consists of a wide variety of appearances show that the proposed method achieves promising performance for both logo extraction and recognition.

In this paper, we propose a new enhancement method for color images. In color image processing, hue preserving is required. The proposed method is performed into HSI color space whose gamut is same as RGB color space. The differential gray-level histogram equalization (DHE) is effective for gray scale images. The proposed method is an extension version of the DHE for color images, and furthermore, the enhancement degree is variable by introducing two parameters. Since our processing method is applied to not only intensity but also saturation, the contrast and the colorfulness of the output image can be varied. It is an important issue how to determine the two parameters. Thus, we give the guideline for how to decide the two parameters. By using the guideline, users can easily obtain their own enhancement images.

Object detection is an essential and expensive process in many computer vision systems. Standard off-the-shelf embedded processors are hard to achieve performance-power balance for implementation of object detection applications. In this work, we explore an Application Specific Instruction set Processor (ASIP) for object detection using Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature. Algorithm simplifications are adopted to reduce memory bandwidth requirements and mathematical complexity without losing reliability. Also, parallel histogram generation and on-the-fly Support Vector Machine (SVM) calculation architecture are employed to reduce the necessary cycle counts. The HOG algorithm on the proposed ASIP was accelerated by a factor of 63x compared to the pure software implementation. The ASIP was synthesized for a standard 90nm CMOS library, with a silicon area of 1.31mm2 and 47.8mW power consumption at a 200MHz frequency. Our object detection processor can achieve 42 frames-per-second (fps) on VGA video. The evaluation and implementation results show that the proposed ASIP is both area-efficient and power-efficient while being competitive with commercial CPUs/DSPs. Furthermore, our ASIP exhibits comparable performance even with hard-wire designs.

We propose a statistical processing method to reduce the time of chip test of high-resolution and low-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). For this kinds of ADCs, due to the influence of noise, conventional histogram or momentum method suffers from long time to collect required data for averaging. The proposed method, based on physically weighing the ADC, intending to physical weights in ADC/DAC under test. It can suppress white noise to 1/22 than conventional method in a case of 10bit binary ADC. Or it can reduce test data to 1/8 or less, which directly means to reduce measuring time to 1/8 or less. In addition, it earns complete Integrated Non-Linearity (INL) and Differential Non-linearity (DNL) even missing codes happens due to less data points. In this report, we theoretically describe how to guarantee missing codes at lacked measured data points.

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has become a popular solution for multimedia delivery nowadays. Because of throughput variations, video quality fluctuates during a streaming session. Therefore, a main challenge in HAS is how to evaluate the overall video quality of a session. In this paper, we explore the impacts of quality values and quality variations in HAS. We propose to use the histogram of segment quality values and the histogram of quality gradients in a session to model the overall video quality. Subjective test results show that the proposed model has very high prediction performance for different videos. Especially, the proposed model provides insights into the influence factors of the overall quality, thus leading to suggestions to improve the quality of streaming video.

There are often low contrast Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) objects in the MTB images. Based on improved histogram equalization (HE), a framework of contrast enhancement is proposed to increase the contrast of MTB images. Our proposed algorithm was compared with the traditional HE and the weighted thresholded HE. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm has better performance in contrast enhancement, artifacts suppression, and brightness preserving for MTB images.