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Novel contrast enhancement scheme for

infrared image using detail-preserving


stretching
Jin-Hyung Kim
Jun-Hyung Kim
Seung-Won Jung
Chang-Kyun Noh
Sung-Jea Ko

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Optical Engineering 50(7), 077002 (July 2011)

Novel contrast enhancement scheme for infrared


image using detail-preserving stretching
Jin-Hyung Kim
Jun-Hyung Kim
Seung-Won Jung
Korea University
School of Electrical Engineering
Anamdong 5-ga
Seongbuk-gu
Seoul, 136-713, Republic of Korea
Chang-Kyun Noh
Agency for Defense Development
The 3rd R&D Institute-1
Yuseong P. O. Box 35
Daejeon, 305-600, Republic of Korea
Sung-Jea Ko
Korea University
School of Electrical Engineering
Anamdong 5-ga
Seongbuk-gu
Seoul, 136-713, Republic of Korea
E-mail: sjko@korea.ac.kr

Abstract. A novel contrast enhancement scheme for infrared (IR) image


using detail-preserving stretching (DPS) is presented in this paper. Unlike CCD images, the histogram of the IR images is not distributed to
the entire dynamic range of the input image. Therefore, in order to enhance the contrast, the proposed method adopts contrast stretching since
it has a low computational complexity and preserves the global contrast
of the original. However, the stretching often produces unpleasant images
that do not contain clear details by limiting the output dynamic range. To
solve this problem, we propose a new contrast stretching method based
on gradient-domain processing (GDP) that can enhance the local image
contrast while preserving the global contrast as well as the image details.
Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms
the conventional stretching-based and other image enhancement methC 2011
ods with respect to the visual quality and computational complexity. 
Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). [DOI: 10.1117/1.3597639]

Subject terms: contrast enhancement; infrared; contrast stretching; gradientdomain processing.


Paper 110122R received Feb. 9, 2011; revised manuscript received May 4, 2011;
accepted for publication May 17, 2011; published online Jul. 6, 2011.

1 Introduction
An infrared (IR) image provides the visual information that
cannot be detected by the human eye. Therefore, it has been
widely used for not only a military purpose, but also, a civilian
purpose.1 In the early days, the civilian application using
the IR image had been limited to surveillance and weather
forecasting. Recently, it is expanded and adopted in consumer
devices such as the surveillance camera, night vision system
in a vehicle, mobile phone with infrared video, and personal
hand-held camera.
Unlike other images captured by the CCD/CMOS
sensors, the IR image typically has low contrast because the
IR image sensor cannot clearly differentiate the object from
the background if they have a similar emissivity, especially
for long-wave IR images. Therefore, a contrast enhancement
technique is essential to improve visibility of IR images.
In the literature, several image enhancement techniques
have been proposed to improve the contrast of the image.
One of the most popular contrast enhancement techniques
is histogram equalization (HE).2 HE is widely used due to
its low computational complexity and affordable contrast
enhancement capability. However, since the histogram
distribution of the IR image is different from that of the
CCD/CMOS image, it often over-enhances the image, which
means HE is not applicable to the IR image.3
Various methods have been proposed to improve the
performance in terms of the visual quality, most of which are
obtained by modifying HE, for example, bi-HE,4 dualistic
sub-image HE,5 multi-HE,6 histogram modification frameC 2011 SPIE
0091-3286/2011/$25.00 

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work (HMF),7 contrast limited adaptive HE (CLAHE),8 etc.


Bi-HE, dualistic sub-image HE, and multi-HE can prevent
the change of the mean brightness of the input image but they
cannot control the level of the enhancement. On the contrary,
HMF can control the level of the enhancement, but it
changes the mean brightness of the input image.9 Compared
to other HE-based techniques, CLAHE can enhance the
contrast of the IR image, including a large low contrast area
produced by the similar brightness level. However, it tends
to over-enhance the contrast and thus produce unnatural
images.10
Other efficient contrast enhancement methods are the human visual system (HVS)-based methods such as perceptionbased contrast enhancement (PCE)11 and adaptive countershading (ACS).12 These methods utilize the HVS factors,
such as the contrast sensitivity and luminance masking, to
improve the local image contrast. Although they enhance the
local contrast clearly, the global contrast can be distorted
by local processing. For IR images, in order to recognize
the target object correctly, it is required that the relative intensity level between the target and background objects is
not changed, which means the global contrast needs to be
preserved.
To design the contrast enhancement method which can
preserve the global contrast and produce the natural image,
we notice contrast stretching.2, 13 The contrast stretching is
one of the simple image contrast enhancement techniques
that can preserve the global contrast and produce a natural
image. Moreover, it can be applied to the system requiring
the real-time processing due to the low computational complexity. However, the detailed information of the original
image can be lost, and it degrades the visual quality of the

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Table 1 A brief description (includes strengths and weakness) for the conventional methods.
Description

Strengths

Weakness

HE-based

Utilizes the local histograms

Preserves the mean brightness

Cannot control the level of the


enhancement

HMF

Defines a functional to adjust a


mapping function

Can control the level of the


enhancement

Changes the mean brightness

CLAHE

Limits the contrast level

Enhances the contrast which


includes a large flat area

Tends to overenhance

HVS-based

Utilizes the HVS factors

Enhances the local contrast


clearly

Distorts the global contrast

Stretching

Expands the dynamic range of


the original image

Fast, preserves the global


contrast

Tends to distort the details of the


original

resultant image. Table 1 represents a brief description for the


conventional methods.
In this paper, we propose a novel contrast enhancement
scheme which can preserve the global contrast and the detailed information of the original simultaneously by combining the contrast stretching and a gradient-domain processing
(GDP).14 The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the proposed contrast enhancement scheme. Experimental results and analysis are given in
Sec. 3 and the conclusion is drawn in Sec. 4.
2 Proposed Contrast Enhancement Scheme
As explained in Sec. 1, contrast stretching is a very useful
method to enhance the contrast of IR imagery due to its characteristic of the histogram. However, it can cause the loss of
the detail in high or low luminance area due to the limitation
of the output range to be stretched. The proposed method
also adopts the contrast stretching method, but the GDP is
newly addressed to cope with the detailed loss problem. In
this section, we first review the conventional stretching and
then a detailed description of the proposed method named
detail-preserving stretching (DPS) follows.
2.1 Contrast Stretching
Contrast stretching is one of the simple image enhancement
techniques. It stretches the original range of pixel values
to a desired range. Since the histogram of an IR image is
mostly concentrated in certain parts (mostly near the area
corresponding to the ambient temperature10 ) as shown in
Fig. 1(d), the stretching can enhance the contrast of IR
image effectively as shown in Fig. 1(c) whereas HE results
in the unnatural looking image as shown in Fig. 1(b). The

stretched pixel value p(x)


for the original pixel value p(x)
is determined as follows:

if p(x) > ph ,
p h ,

p(x)
= K [ p(x) pl ] + pl , if pl  p(x)  ph ,
(1)

pl ,
if p(x) < pl ,
where x is a pixel in an image, K is a stretching gain defined
by
p h pl
K =
,
(2)
ph pl
where ph , pl , p h , and pl denote the upper, lower, stretched
upper and stretched lower pixel value limits, respectively. As
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described in Eq. (1), values below pl are set to pl and values


above ph are set to p h . Figure 2 shows a typical mapping function of the contrast stretching. The mapping function is monotonically increasing, which means that the relative intensity
level of the pixel values is not inverted by the stretching.
Thus, the global contrast of the original image is preserved.
The performance of the stretching is dependent on how
pixel value limits are set. Among many stretching methods,
the simplest one is to normalize the pixel value range from
the minimum to the maximum of the dynamic range of the
image. To be specific, ph , pl , p h , and pl are set to the highest
pixel value, lowest one, 2 N 1, and 0 for N -bit gray-level
image, respectively. This stretching, linear stretching, is
very simple and provides proper visual quality, however, a
small area with a very high or low gray-level [in a circle at
the top-right of Fig. 3(a)] can severely affect the value of
pl and ph , which could lead to unrepresentative scaling as
shown in Fig. 3(b).
A more robust approach to avoid this problem is meanbased stretching. The mean-based stretching selects the limits using the mean and standard deviation of the pixel values
in the input image. Specifically, the limits pl and ph are set
as follows:
pl = m , ph = m + ,

(3)

where m and are the mean and standard deviation of the


original image. By properly choosing the positive coefficients
and , the mean-based stretching prevents outliers affecting
the scaling, and thus the global contrast can be preserved and
the resultant image is visually pleasing, as shown in Fig. 3(c).
However, the mean-based stretching has a critical drawback. Since the pixel values below pl and above ph are set
to pl and p h respectively, it is observed that the mean-based
stretching causes the loss of the detail in the high or low luminance area as shown in Fig. 4(a) , and the artifact is named
saturation.
2.2 Detail-Preserving Stretching Using
Gradient-Domain Processing
To prevent the saturation and preserve the details of the original, the proposed method utilizes image gradients of the
original image. In the literature, the image gradients have
been widely used for the local contrast enhancement11, 12, 15
and the image editing.16 Especially, Lu et al. proposed the
contrast stretching using multiscale gradients. However, the

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(b)

(c)

Number of pixels

Number of pixels

Number of pixels

(a)

0.2

0.6

0.4

Graylevel

Graylevel

Graylevel

(d)

(e)

(f)

0.8

Fig. 1 Mountain: (a) Original, (b) histogram equalization, (c) the linear stretched, (d) the histogram of (a), (e) the histogram of (b), (f) the histogram
of (c).

method works only on the wavelet transform, and the detail


loss due to the contrast stretching is not considered. To design a detail-preserving contrast enhancement method dedicated to IR image processing, we adopt the GDP, the recently
developed and most popular method, to manipulate the gradient and the pixel values of the image.14 Figure 5 shows
the block diagram of the proposed method. First, by applying the mean-based stretching, the stretching gain K and the
stretched image v are obtained, and then the gradient of the
original image g is computed. By using K and g, the target
gradient G is calculated, and then the gradient field of the
stretched image is replaced to G. Last, the GDP finally reconstructs the resultant image f using G and v. The following
describes the detailed procedure.
From Eq. (1), if both pixel values of the ith and (i + 1)th
pixels exist within the limits, which means the pixel value

is not saturated by the stretching, the corresponding gradient


G(xi ) of the ith pixel in the stretched image is obtained by
i ) p(x
i+1 )
G(xi ) = p(x
= K [ p(xi ) pl ] K [ p(xi+1 ) pl ]
= K [ p(xi ) p(xi+1 )] = K g(xi ),

(4)

where g(xi ) denotes the gradient of the ith pixel in the


original image and the gradient is defined as a difference
between two adjacent pixels as follows:
g (xi ) = p (xi ) p (xi + 1)
= [ p (xi , yi ) p (xi + 1, yi ) , p (xi , yi )
p (xi , yi + 1)].

(5)

Equation (4) means the gradient of the stretched image


is the same as that of the original image multiplied by K .
Otherwise, if either p(xi ) or p(xi+1 ) exists beyond the limits,
G(xi ) is less than g(xi ) multiplied by K or equal to zero. We
notice that this is the loss of the detailed information by the
stretching. To prevent this, we set G(xi ) to g(xi ) multiplied
by K for all the pixels in the image. As a result, G(x) is
defined as follows:


{G (xi )} =
{K g (xi )},
(6)

2N-1

Output gray level

ph'

xi f

xi f

or equivalently
G = K g.

pl'
0

pl

ph

2N-1

Input gray level


Fig. 2 Mapping function of the contrast stretching.

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(7)

By setting the above, the loss of the detailed information


can be prevented. However, forcing the gradient of f to
always have G does not guarantee the preservation of the
global image contrast. Therefore, we additionally constrain
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(a)

(c)

Number of pixels

Number of pixels

Number of pixels

(b)

Graylevel
(d)

0.2

0.6

0.4

Graylevel
(e)

0.8

Graylevel
(f)

Fig. 3 The IR image including small and bright area: (a) Original; (b) the linear stretched; (c) the mean-based stretched ( = 3, = 1); (d) the
histogram of (a); (e) the histogram of (b); and (f) the histogram of (c).

f to have pixel values similar to v because the global contrast


of the original is maintained in v. To this end, we obtain f
by minimizing the following energy function:

where E is the energy function consisting of the data cost


function E d and the gradient cost function E g These functions are defined as follows:

E d = d ( f v)2 ,

x f

E=

(E d + E g ),

(8)

E g = g {( f x Gx )2 + ( f y G y )2 },

x f

(c)

(b)

Graylevel

(d)

Number of pixels

Number of pixels

Number of pixels

(a)

(9)

0.2

0.6

0.4

Graylevel

0.8

(e)

0.2

0.4

0.6

Graylevel

0.8

(f)

Fig. 4 The IR image: (a) Original; (b) the linear stretched; (c) the mean-based stretched ( = 3, = 1); (d) the histogram of (a); (e) the histogram
of (b); (f) the histogram of (c).

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Calculate
gradient field

G
g

Gradient domain
processing

Original image

Stretching

stretching
gain (K)

where f x and f y denote the horizontal and vertical derivative


of the final image f , Gx , and G y respectively denote the
horizontal and vertical components of G, respectively. d
and g are the weights for the data and the gradient cost
functions, respectively. The weights d and g control the
amount of influence on the final image, and a method is
introduced on how to set the value of the weights.17 In this
paper, the weights are empirically set to 1 and this results in
the affordable visual quality.
The final image f that minimizes Eq. (8) satisfies the
EulerLagrange equation,
E
E
E

= 0.
f
x fx
y fy

v
Stretched image

(10)

Rearranging Eq. (10) yields

Enhanced image

Fig. 5 Flowchart of the proposed contrast enhancement algorithm.

(d /g ) f ( f x x + f yy ) = (d /g )v (Gx + G y ),

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Image 4

Image 5

Image 6

Image 7

Image 8

Image 9

Image 10

Image 11

Image 12

Image 13

Image 14

Image 15

Image 16

Image 17

Image 18

Image 19

Image 20

(11)

Fig. 6 The sample IR images.

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(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

(h)

(i)

Fig. 7 The mean-based stretched image with the limits pl and ph set to m and m + , respectively. and are (a) 1, 1, (b) 1, 2, (c) 1, 3,
(d) 2, 1, (e) 2, 2, (f) 2, 3, (g) 3, 1, (h) 3, 2, and (i) 3, 3.

or equivalently
(d /g ) f f = (d /g )v G,
2

(12)

where f x x and f yy are the horizontal and vertical components of 2 f , the Laplacian of f , respectively, and G
denotes the divergence of G. Equation (12) is a screened
Poisson equation, and finding f is equivalent to solving the
screened Poisson equation. To solve the equation, many solutions have been proposed, such as the conjugate-gradient
method,18 a fast Fourier-domain solver,17 etc. These solutions
are fast enough for real-time processing and the conjugategradient method is adopted in the proposed method. Finally,
by applying the conjugate-gradient method, the final result
f is obtained which minimizes E. For a detailed description of the conjugate-gradient method, the reader may refer to Numerical Recipes in C (Ref. 19) or Shewchuks
paper.18
3 Experimental Results and Analysis
In this section, we verify the performance of the proposed
contrast enhancement scheme. In the simulation, we have
tested 20 IR images, where the resultant images obtained
by the proposed algorithm are provided in Fig. 6. Among
them, the experiments on I mage8, I mage10, and I mage12
with a resolution of 320240 including complex and textured areas (building, trees, etc) are detailed in this paper.
Figure 7 illustrates the mean-based stretched image of the
sample image 12 with varying the coefficients and . As
can be seen, the visual quality of the mean-based stretched
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image is dependent on the coefficients. We set and to 3


and 1 experimentally, which produce a proper visual quality
for the sample IR images.
To verify the performance of the detail-preserving,
Fig. 8 shows the comparison of the gradient fields of the
sample image 8 between the mean-based stretched image
and the resultant image obtained by the proposed method. It

Mean-based stretched

Proposed

1
3
2

1
3
2
(a)

(b)

Fig. 8 (a) The horizontal gradient fields of the mean-based stretched


image (top) and the resultant image with the proposed method (bottom). (b) The enlarged sub-images of each numbered area.

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Fig. 9 Histograms of the original image (top) and the resultant images with the mean-based stretching (middle) and the proposed scheme
(bottom). (a) Image8, (b) Image10, and (c) Image12.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

Fig. 10 Image 8: (a) Original; (b) the mean-based stretching, (c) perception-based contrast enhancement; (d) CLAHE; (e) adaptive countershading; (f) the proposed.

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(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

Fig. 11 Image 10: (a) Original; (b) the mean-based stretching; (c) perception based contrast enhancement, (d) CLAHE; (e) adaptive countershading; (f) the proposed.

can be observed that the detailed information is more clearly


preserved in the proposed method as compared with that
in the mean-based stretched image. By comparing the histograms in Fig. 9, it is seen that the data loss caused by
saturation is reduced. To be specific, the proposed method
reduces the number of the outlier pixels denoted by the cir-

cles in Fig. 9 by 46.4%, 44.6%, and 60% for the sample


image 8, 10, and 12 respectively, compared to the meanbased stretching.
In Figs. 10, 11, and 12, we compare the resultant images
obtained by the mean-based stretching, CLAHE, perceptionbased contrast enhancement, adaptive counter-shading, and

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

Fig. 12 Image 12: (a) Original; (b) the mean-based stretching; (c) perception-based contrast enhancement; (d) CLAHE; (e) adaptive countershading; (f) the proposed.

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Table 2 Processing speed for the sample images (milliseconds).

Table 3 Block mean error of the sample images.

Image

MS

PCE

ACS

CLAHE

Proposed

Image

MS

PCE

ACS

CLAHE

Proposed

12.4

584.2

80.3

341.9

22.4

0.19

0.01

0.05

0.11

0.05

12.7

1091.8

80.7

335.9

22.7

0.01

0.11

0.04

0.20

0.01

12.5

1084.7

80.7

346.2

22.4

0.05

0.03

0.04

0.11

0.05

12.6

520.1

81.1

344.6

26.8

0.12

0.09

0.07

0.20

0.02

12.7

1099.3

81.0

354.3

23.5

0.09

0.15

0.12

12.8

550.4

81.7

342.1

22.8

0.11

0.09

0.07

0.14

0.01

13.3

679.0

85.2

337.9

23.4

0.09

0.05

0.05

0.18

12.6

2364.7

81.4

342.1

23.3

0.02

0.11

0.08

0.06

0.02

12.7

444.1

81.1

340.3

22.6

0.09

0.05

0.06

0.10

10

12.5

1598.1

81.3

340.5

22.8

10

0.02

0.15

0.07

0.09

11

12.7

548.8

81.6

335.8

22.8

11

0.14

0.14

0.05

0.21

0.01

12

12.8

1214.7

85.1

342.0

22.7

12

0.07

0.13

0.10

0.08

0.01

13

12.6

481.2

80.3

343.4

26.3

13

0.07

0.02

0.13

0.11

0.01

14

12.5

904.5

81.2

342.2

22.6

14

0.05

0.16

0.08

0.15

0.02

15

12.8

2034.6

81.2

340.8

22.7

15

0.07

0.05

0.07

0.15

0.01

16

12.6

2128.4

85.8

342.6

22.3

16

0.03

0.09

0.06

0.09

17

12.7

2294.4

85.1

338.4

22.1

17

0.03

0.08

0.07

0.08

18

12.5

1058.7

81.5

341.9

22.7

18

0.11

0.02

0.07

0.16

0.01

19

12.6

362.2

81.0

336.9

22.7

19

0.03

0.07

0.07

0.21

0.01

20

12.6

553.6

86.9

342.0

24.8

20

0.03

0.08

0.06

0.21

0.01

Average

12.7

1079.9

82.2

341.6

23.2

Average

0.07

0.08

0.07

0.14

0.01

Note: MS is mean-based stretching.

the proposed method. It is observed that the mean-based


stretching preserves the global contrast, but the details are
lost. The perception-based contrast enhancement fails to
control the brightness and the adaptive countershading distorts the global contrast. The resultant images obtained by
CLAHE show un-natural looking images. The resultant images obtained by the proposed scheme demonstrate that the
proposed method effectively improves the visual quality, as
well as preserves the global contrast and the detail.
In addition, we evaluate the computational complexity
of the proposed method. Comparison results of the computational complexity for the conventional and proposed
methods are summarized in Table 2. As compared with the
mean-based stretching, the proposed method spends more
time in the computation since the scheme performs the GDP
additionally. Except this case, it is noted that the proposed
method achieves the higher performance in terms of the
processing speed.
Last, we compare the performance of the global contrast
preserving using block mean error (BME) between the conventional methods and the proposed one. The BME R is
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obtained by the followings:



|Mo (bk ) Mt (bk )|,
R( f ) =

(13)

bk f

M(bk ) = [m(bk ) m min ]/(m max m min ),

(14)

where m(bk ) is the mean of the pixel value of the kth block
bk in the image. m min and m max denote the minimum and
maximum value of the mean. M(bk ) is a normalized mean
value, Mo and Mt denote the means of the original and target,
respectively. If R is close to zero, the global contrast of the
target image is similar to the one of the original, which means
the global contrast of the original is preserved. In Table 3, it
is observed that the BME of the proposed method is smaller
than others.
4 Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed the new contrast enhancement
scheme for the IR image using detail-preserving stretching.
The proposed method is posed as a minimization problem
that balances preservation of the gradient with preservation

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of the global contrast. It utilizes the contrast stretching to


improve a visual quality of the input image; however, the
stretching can cause the loss of the detail part in an image.
To cope with this problem, DPS was newly presented to preserve the detail and enhance the contrast of the image using
GDP. Experimental results show that the proposed method
can produce a natural looking image by enhancing the local contrast while preserving the global contrast, as well as
the image details. Since the proposed DPS method improves
the computing speed as compared with the others, it can be
successfully adopted in the hand-held camera, the surveillance system, and driving assistant system in a vehicle which
requires real-time processing.

Jin-Hyung Kim received a BS degree in


electronic engineering from Korea University in 2004. He is currently working toward his PhD degree in the Department of
Electronic Engineering at Korea University.
His research interests are image enhancement, image compression, and digital video
processing. His current research topic is a
development of a high performance camera system and image enhancement algorithm for high resolution and high dynamic
range video.

Jun-Hyung Kim received a BS degree from


Korea University, in Electronic Engineering,
in 2006. He is currently pursuing a PhD degree in School of Electrical Engineering at
Korea University. His research interests are
in the areas of image processing.

Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Agency for Defense Development (ADD) under the project Local area processing
for EO/IR image and by Mid-career Researcher Program
through a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF)
grant funded by the Korea government (MEST) (No. 20110000200).
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Optical Engineering

Seung-Won Jung received BS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering in 2005 and
2011, respectively, from Korea University,
Seoul, Korea. He is now a post-doctoral research fellow in the Research Institute of Information and Communication Technology,
Korea University, Seoul, Korea. His research
interests include image enhancement, image
restoration, video compression, and computer vision.

Chang-Kyun Noh received an MS degree in


electronics engineering from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 2000. He is currently
working at the Agency for Defense Development for developing EO/IR technology. His
current research topic is a development of
an EO/IR image enhancement algorithm.

Sung-Jea Ko received a PhD degree in 1988


and an MS degree in 1986, both in electrical
and computer engineering, from State University of New York at Buffalo, and a BS degree in electronic engineering at Korea University in 1980. In 1992, he joined the Department of Electronic Engineering at Korea
University where he is currently a professor.
From 1988 to 1992, he was an assistant professor of the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering at the University of
MichiganDearborn. He has published over 140 international journal
articles. He also holds over 50 patents registered on video signal
processing and multimedia communications. He is the 1999 Recipient of the LG Research Award given to the Outstanding Information
Technology and Communication Researcher. He received the HaeDong best paper award from the IEEK (1997) and the best paper
award from the IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (1996), and the research excellence award from Korea University (2004). He has served as a TPC member for the IEEE Conference
on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) since 1997 and received a 10-year
service award from the TPC of ICCE in 2008. He is also a TPC member and an international advisor of ICCE-Berlin and a member of the
editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics.

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