Jeong Hyeonwoo1
Kim Dongkeun1
Choi Kang-Sun1
-
(Electrical, Electronics & Communication Engineering, Korea University of Technology
and Education (KOREATECH), Cheonan 31253, Korea {shine1606, dk970610, ks.choi}@kroeatech.ac.kr
)
Copyright © The Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers(IEIE)
Keywords
Color consistency, Color distribution, Point set registration, Image stitching, Superpixels
1. Introduction
MULTI-VIEW images acquired from different types of cameras have color discrepancies
since the colors of digital images are quite different depending on the characteristics
of image sensors. Even images acquired through an identical sensor may can also have
a color inconsistency problem due to various internal and external factors, such as
shading depending on the lighting direction, the base region for white balance, and
exposure time. These color discrepancies cause performance degradation in consumer
electronics applications that use multi-view images, such as video stitching for multiple
camera-based surveillance systems [1,2], three-dimensional reconstruction [3,4], and image stitching for panoramic images on mobile phones [5]. For example, in the case of 3D reconstruction, correspondence matching between color
inconsistent images is prone to failure. As a result, the point cloud reconstructed
from images with color inconsistency becomes very sparse and noisy.
Thanks to high-resolution cameras and powerful 3D graphics processors within mobile
phones, panoramic images can be instantly created in mobile phones after taking multiple
images [1]. However, color inconsistency in the multiple images results in very annoying visual
artifacts within the panoramic image, especially along the boundaries of the overlapping
areas. To mitigate the color inconsistency among multi-view images, various color
correction methods have been proposed by imposing the color characteristics of a target
image on source images [6-11].
The most efficient method [6] transfers the color characteristics by adjusting the standard deviation of the source
image according to that of the target image for each color channel. In another method
[7], gamma correction is performed for the luminance component, while linear correction
is simply used for the chrominance components. Color consistency enhancement methods
modeling the color remapping function as a spline curve were proposed [8-11]. However, these remapping-per-channel approaches usually result in a color cast (white
balance) problem.
By regarding each pixel color as a 3D point, a color image can be represented as a
3D point cloud in the RGB color space. In this sense, color transfer can be viewed
as a transformation of the 3D point cloud, so improving color consistency between
two images can be considered as registration and transformation between point clouds
distributed differently in the RGB color space. In this paper, we propose a novel
color correction method to enhance the color consistency of multi-view images. In
contrast to conventional methods that determine transfer functions explicitly, the
proposed method transforms the color point cloud of the source image into that of
the reference image non-rigidly by using a 3D point set registration algorithm.
Specifically, non-rigid registration between the target and source point clouds provides
color correspondences between both images. Although the correspondence matching is
not performed explicitly, the color change of corresponding pixels in the two images
can be inferred. However, determining color correspondences of all the pixels requires
huge computational burdens, as expected. In order to significantly reduce the computation
for the 3D point cloud registration, we propose a point cloud simplification method.
For each image, superpixel segmentation followed by the k-means clustering is employed
to determine representative color values. The point cloud of the representative colors
effectively approximates the point cloud of the image, even though it contains significantly
fewer points. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method outperforms
conventional methods.
This work extends our previous results [12] in several important respects. The proposed method is explicated in more detail,
we further implement and compare recently presented methods, the number of data sets
used is increased, and we present the execution times of the methods, which is critical
for consumer electronic devices. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In
the following section, an overview of related work is given. In Section III, the proposed
color correction approach is explicated in detail. In Section IV, the proposed method
is evaluated with objective and subjective comparisons. Finally, conclusions are presented
in Section V.
2. Related Work
2.1 Multi-view Image Color Correction
Color consistency among several images can be improved by fitting the color distribution
of a source image I$_{s}$ among the images to that of the target image I$_{t}$. The
concept of color transfer was first proposed by Reinhard et al. [6], who aimed to propagate the color characteristic of I$_{t}$ to that of I$_{s}$. In
order to decorrelate different color channels, the RGB color signals of both I$_{t}$
and I$_{s}$ are converted to the CIELab color space. Then, the distribution of each
channel of I$_{s}$ is modified to have the same standard deviation as that of the
same channel of I$_{t}$.
In one study [7], the overlapping area between the adjacent linearized images is extracted, and the
logarithmic mean for the luminance component and the mean for the chrominance components
are computed with respect to the overlapping area of each image. The gamma values
are estimated to minimize the differences of every pair of the logarithmic means.
Similarly, the coefficients to be applied to the chrominance components are estimated
by minimizing the differences of every adjacent pairs of the chroma-means.
To make a more accurate color mapping, Hwang et al. [11] proposed correcting each pixel’s color with an independent affine model, which is
the solution of a probabilistic moving least square based on feature color correspondences.
In the color correction algorithm [8], for each color channel, a fifth-degree polynomial is determined to transfer colors.
Before determining the polynomial, the authors use the scale-invariant feature transform
(SIFT) algorithm [13] to match correspondences between the source image I$_{s}$ and the target I$_{t}$.
Then, the fifth-degree polynomial is determined using least squares regression with
the correspondences. Since extreme pixel values of very dark or bright regions tend
not to be selected as features, the regressed polynomial cannot deal with such pixel
values. In order to cope with this problem, a small number of correspondence samples
under the 10th percentile and over the 90th percentile are regressed by a one-dimensional
linear model.
However, if the number of correspondences is small in the middle range, the fifth-degree
polynomial will overfit and result in a distorted representation. In addition, this
method requires the extraction of a sufficient number of features in the background
and foreground for effective color correction. Otherwise, the color correction quality
is degraded.
In another study [10], instead of using feature matching, the 3D geometrical relation between the source
and target images is utilized. This method can find more accurate correspondences
by projecting 3D points onto both I$_{t}$ and I$_{s}$. However, the geometrical relation
(the relative pose of the images) is usually unavailable or should be determined in
advance using a calibration process, so it is generally hard to apply this method.
Furthermore, inaccurate regression due to lack of correspondences can also occur,
as in a study described earlier [8].
The cost function of optimization-based method [9] consists of color and quality terms. In the color term, the quadratic spline is obtained
and explains the color difference through the cumulative distribution function (CDF)
matching. In the quality term, constraints such as gradient preservation and stretching
of the dynamic range are imposed. Color is corrected like in the polynomial regression-based
method, but image quality is preserved due to constraints.
2.2 Non-rigid 3D Point Set Registration
The iterative closest point (ICP) method is the most popular method for registering
rigid 3D point clouds due to its simplicity and low computational complexity [14-17]. ICP iteratively improves the pose of a point cloud with respect to the reference
(target/base) point cloud by minimizing overall distances between correspondences.
However, if the initial guess about the pose of the point cloud is not close to the
optimal pose, registration easily fails.
The coherent point drift (CPD) algorithm [18] assigns correspondences between two sets of points and recovers the transformation
that maps one point set to another using a probabilistic density estimation approach.
One point cloud $\mathbf{Y}_{M\times D}=\left(\mathbf{y}_{1},\cdots ,\mathbf{y}_{M}\right)^{T}$
represented using Gaussian mixture model (GMM) centroids is fitted to another point
cloud $\mathbf{X}_{N\times D}=\left(\mathbf{x}_{1},\cdots ,\mathbf{x}_{N}\right)^{T}$
by maximizing the likelihood. In the CPD algorithm, both the correspondence matching
and transformation determination are achieved through the expectation-maximization
(EM) optimization approach. The GMM centroids are parameterized with the transformation
parameters $~ \theta $ and the variances of Gaussians $\sigma ^{2}$. The GMM probability
density function of the CPD method can be written as:
where $p\left(\mathbf{x}|\mathbf{y}_{m}\right)=\frac{1}{\left(2\pi \sigma ^{2}\right)^{D/2}}\exp
\left(-\frac{\left\| \mathbf{x}-\mathbf{y}_{m}\right\| ^{2}}{2\sigma ^{2}}\right).$
In the E-step, a posteriori probability distributions of mixture components $P^{old}\left(\mathbf{y}_{m}|\mathbf{x}_{n}\right)$
obtained using previous (``old'') parameter values are computed.
where $T\left(\mathbf{y}_{m},\theta \right)$ is a transformation applied to $\mathbf{Y}$.
Then, the parameter values are updated by minimizing the expectation of a negative
log-likelihood function in the M-step. The objective function can be written as:
The EM algorithm proceeds by alternating between E- and M-steps until convergence.
The GMM centroids move coherently as a group to preserve the topological structure
of the point clouds. By imposing coherence constraint properly, CPD can achieve rigid
and non-rigid registration by using regularization. However, despite the existence
of a fast algorithm for CPD, its computational complexity easily increases as the
point cloud increases because the probability estimation involving the Gaussian modeling
in the E-step should be performed for each point.
3. The Proposed Method
Fig. 1 illustrates an overview of the proposed method. Given N multi-view images $\left\{\mathbf{I}_{i}\right\},i=1,\cdots
,N$, a target (reference) image I$_{t}$ is chosen from them, and a source image $\mathbf{I}_{s}\in
\left\{\mathbf{I}_{i}\right\}/\mathbf{I}_{t}$ is color-corrected according to target
image I$_{t}$. For efficiently performing the point set registration process in the
color transfer (CF) module, representative colors of I$_{t}$ and I$_{s}$ (respectively
referred to as color point sets C$_{t}$ and C$_{s}$) are initially obtained through
the representative color point cloud approximation (RCPCA) module. Each set contains
much fewer color points compared to the number of pixels in the corresponding image.
It is nevertheless noteworthy that the point set effectively approximates the color
distribution of the image, as shown in the three point cloud plots at the bottom of
Fig. 1.
The CPD algorithm is employed to obtain the transformation for registering C$_{s}$
to C$_{t}$ robustly. Because C$_{t}$ and C$_{s}$ do not contain all the color values
of I$_{t}$ and I$_{s}$, the actual color change for each pixel in I$_{s}$ is determined
by propagating the color change of an associated representative color to the pixel.
An image with enhanced color consistency I$_{s` }$ is produced through the color change
propagation.
Fig. 1. The overview of the proposed method. The representative color point cloud approximation module approximates the color distribution of each image I with a much smaller number of representative color points C, which are obtained by clustering the average colors of the superpixels. The 3D point set registration determines non-rigid transformations V for matching correspondences between the reduced color point sets. Each pixel color of I$_{s}$ changes according to the color transfer of its associated cluster.
3.1 Representative Color Point Cloud Approximation
In the proposed method, the CPD method is employed to transform a point cloud representing
the color distribution of a source image to the point cloud of the color distribution
of the target image. However, because there is much computation for iteratively estimating
per-point probabilities, using CPD directly for the point cloud of the image is impractical
for consumer electronic devices. Therefore, in the proposed method, the color distribution
of the images is simplified through a faithful yet efficient approximation method
before performing CPD. That is, by obtaining much fewer representative color points,
the number of points to be processed in the later 3D point set registration is sufficiently
reduced.
In order to obtain faithful representatives, the color values are deliberately determined
through the following two processes in the RCPCA module. Firstly, both I$_{t}$ and
I$_{s}$ are over-segmented to homogeneous regions S$_{t}$ and S$_{s}$, respectively.
This is done using the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) algorithm [19-21], which has been widely used for preprocessing in various computer vision tasks. During
the SLIC process, it is notable that an average color value and central position are
also determined for each superpixel $S_{i}^{~ j}\in \mathbf{S}_{i}$.
k-means clustering iteratively computes distances from each pixel to all the segment
centroids to determine the closest one to which the pixel belongs. This strategy increases
the computational complexity linearly with respect to the number of segments. In contrast,
in the SLIC algorithm, regardless of the number of segment centroids, only a few centroids
$\mathrm{S}_{\mathrm{i}}^{\mathrm{~ j}}$ near each pixel p are compared in terms of
the distance, which is given as:
where $S_{i}^{~ j}$ represents the j-th superpixel, $j=1,\cdots ,N_{S}$. $D_{c}\left(\cdot
,\cdot \right)$ and $D_{s}\left(\cdot ,\cdot \right)$ indicate the CIELab color and
spatial distances between $p$ and $S_{i}^{~ j},$ respectively. $\lambda $ controls
the compactness of the superpixels. The reduction in the distance computation makes
the SLIC perform very fast with excellent boundary adherence performance.
Then, the representative color values C$_{t}$ and C$_{s}$ are determined by the k-means
clustering of the color values of the superpixels S$_{t}$ and S$_{s}$$_{,}$ respectively,
where each representative color set C$_{i}$ has N$_{C}$ color values denoted by $C_{i}^{~
k}$. The number of representative color values is much less than the number of superpixels
of each image $\left(N_{C}\ll N_{S}\right)\,.$ It is notable that almost identical
representative color values can be obtained by using only the k-means clustering [22] with I$_{t}$ and I$_{s}$ directly without over-segmentation. In this case, however,
the computational complexity of the k-means clustering increases drastically, which
will be presented later in the experiment.
If N$_{S}$ is too small, the superpixel regions are enlarged and inhomogeneous, resulting
in inaccurate representative color values. This is why we initially obtain sufficient
representative color points using the superpixel segmentation and then further reduce
the number of points with k-means clustering. Since $N_{S}$ is much smaller than the
number of pixels, the k-means clustering is also performed fast. As shown in Fig. 1, the point cloud of the representative color values approximates the color distribution
of the original image faithfully. In addition, the association mapping $\mathrm{M}$
between each pixel and the representative color $C_{i}^{~ k}$ to which the pixel belongs
can be also obtained during this RCPCA process. This mapping information is effectively
exploited in the subsequent color change propagation process.
3.2 Non-rigid 3D Point Set Registration
The CPD algorithm is performed to assign correspondences between the two representative
color point clouds C$_{t}$ and C$_{s}$ and to obtain a transformed point cloud C$_{s`
}$ by estimating the non-rigid transformation for each correspondence pair. Since
C$_{t}$ and C$_{s}$ have the same number of color values, correspondences can be inferred
through point proximity. Let $v^{~ k}$ denote the color change of $C_{s}^{~ k}$:
All the pixels associated with $C_{s}^{~ k}$ according to M are transferred by applying
$v^{~ k}$ to the pixels; i.e., by simply adding $v^{~ k}$ to their color values.
Fig. 2 demonstrates a representative color point cloud C$_{s}$ and its transformed point
cloud C$_{s` }$ with the color change of a correspondence pair in the RGB color space.
Because $C_{s}^{~ k}$ is actually obtained from and associated with superpixels, pixels
within each superpixel are transferred using the same $v^{~ k}$. Since the superpixel
is well aligned with the object boundary, this approach enhances the color consistency
naturally without visually annoying pixels, which can occur when transferring adjacent
pixels differently.
Fig. 2. Color transfer using non-rigid 3D point set registration. A representative color $C_{S}^{~ k}$ is transformed to $C_{S'}^{~ k}$, and the color change $v^{~ k}$ is obtained. The color values of the pixels associated with $C_{S}^{~ k}$ are transferred by $v^{~ k}$.
4. Experimental Results
In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, a color transfer (CT)
method [6], a gamma correction-based (GC) method [7], a polynomial regression-based (PR) method [8], and an optimization- based (OPT) method [9] were implemented and compared. We used 23 pairs in Middlebury [23], 1024 pairs in Instereo2K [25], 120 pairs in IVYLAB [26], and 17 pairs in our multi-view dataset.
In each dataset, the left image was utilized as a target image. Since our dataset
has a wider baseline than other datasets, and each image was taken with a different
exposure time, large color discrepancy exists between the images.
The parameters for the proposed method are summarized in Table 1. $\lambda $ was set experimentally to control the effect of distance term of SLIC
algorithm and to make the image well-representative. $N_{S}$, $N_{C}$, and the maximum
iteration number in CPD were set to be suitable for the computational power of various
consumer electronics. Fig. 3 shows the correction results of multi-view color discrepancy caused by auto-exposure
in widely used consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and digital cameras. The
target image is darker than the source image due to a small exposure time. The PR,
OPT, and the proposed methods produce tones more similar to the target image than
the CT and GC methods. However, the PR and OPT methods, which utilize feature matching,
failed to effectively transfer colors of the yellow and cyan chairs due to lack of
features over the textureless objects. In Fig. 3(f), the color distribution matching-based proposed method successfully color-corrected
for all objects and backgrounds.
To evaluate the methods objectively, we compared the structural similarity by averaging
the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) [13] for three color channels as follows:
Table 1. Parameter Settings for the Proposed Method.
Parameter
|
Value
|
$\lambda $
|
20
|
$N_{S}$
|
2400
|
$N_{C}$
|
128
|
Maximum number of iterations for CPD
|
100
|
where x and y indicate each window to measure. The luminance term $I(x,y)$ and the
contrast term $c(x,y)$ are calculated as follows:
where $\mu _{x}$ and $\mu _{y}$ represent the average of color, and $\sigma _{x}$
and $\sigma _{y}$ represent the variance of color for window x and y, respectively.
$c_{1}$ and $c_{2}$ are stabilization terms for division with a weak dominator. Table 2 shows objective comparison of the methods in terms of SSIM for the four multi-view
image datasets. The best and second best values are presented in bold and red, respectively.
The CT method scored the highest value for the three datasets that were taken with
a small baseline and had small color differences. However, there was only a slight
improvement for our dataset with a large baseline and color difference. The GC and
PR methods even degraded color consistency for the small-baseline datasets.
The OPT and proposed methods were improved for all the datasets, and the proposed
method achieved the highest value for our dataset and on average. The proposed method
without over-segmentation was also improved in all the datasets, but the k-means clustering
in the method did not converge sufficiently due to a large number of pixels. As a
result, inaccurate representative colors were obtained, and the performance was lower
than that of the proposed method using over-segmentation.
As an additional objective evaluation, the methods were compared in terms of the peak
signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). PSNR measures the numerical similarity of each pixel
and was calculated as follows:
where $R$ represents the maximum possible pixel value of the image. The mean squared
error (MSE) is calculated as follows:
where $M$ and $N$ represent the number of rows and columns of image $I$.
Fig. 3. Subjective comparisons of various color correction method: (a) Color-inconsistent source image I$_{s}$; (b) Image obtained using CT[6]; (c) Image obtained using GC[7]; (d) Image obtained using PR[8]; (e) Image obtained using OPT[9]; (f) Image obtained using the proposed method.
Table 2. Comparison of Structural Similarity (SSIM).
Dataset
|
Input image
|
CT [6]
|
GC [7]
|
PR [8]
|
OPT [9]
|
Proposed
w/o
over-seg.
|
Proposed
|
InStereo2K
|
0.9979
|
0.9989
|
0.9972
|
0.9962
|
0.9984
|
0.9982
|
0.9984
|
IVYLAB
|
0.9988
|
0.9994
|
0.9986
|
0.9954
|
0.9990
|
0.9990
|
0.9994
|
Middlebury
|
0.9991
|
0.9993
|
0.9990
|
0.9987
|
0.9993
|
0.9991
|
0.9992
|
ours
|
0.9371
|
0.9545
|
0.9525
|
0.9704
|
0.9863
|
0.9916
|
0.9985
|
Avg.
|
0.9832
|
0.9880
|
0.9868
|
0.9902
|
0.9958
|
0.9970
|
0.9989
|
Table 3. Comparison of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR).
Dataset
|
Input image
|
CT [6]
|
GC [7]
|
PR [8]
|
OPT [9]
|
Proposed
w/o
over-seg.
|
Proposed
|
InStereo2K
|
17.399
|
17.428
|
17.354
|
17.421
|
17.281
|
17.443
|
17.432
|
IVYLAB
|
16.689
|
16.798
|
16.677
|
16.976
|
16.620
|
16.801
|
16.774
|
Middlebury
|
14.013
|
13.995
|
14.009
|
14.137
|
13.899
|
14.051
|
14.046
|
ours
|
16.674
|
16.776
|
17.476
|
18.153
|
18.121
|
18.206
|
18.453
|
Avg.
|
16.194
|
16.249
|
16.379
|
16.672
|
16.480
|
16.625
|
16.676
|
Table 4. Comparison of Execution Time (ms).
Resolution
|
CT [6]
|
GC [7]
|
PR [8]
|
OPT [9]
|
Proposed
w/o
over-seg.
|
Proposed
|
2880x1988
|
4.19
|
12.37
|
7.08
|
8.35
|
266.95
|
6.31
|
1920x1080
|
1.66
|
6.00
|
3.21
|
3.44
|
88.33
|
2.44
|
320x480
|
0.15
|
0.77
|
0.05
|
0.94
|
5.50
|
0.41
|
Avg.
|
2.00
|
6.38
|
3.45
|
4.24
|
120.26
|
3.05
|
Table 3 shows a comparison in terms of PSNR. The CT and GC methods showed low average values
similar to structural similarity. The PR method showed the highest values for IVYLAB
and Middlebury datasets, whereas it was degraded in SSIM. The OPT method degraded
the color consistency in all the datasets except ours.
The proposed method improved the color consistency for all datasets and achieved the
highest values for InStero2K, our dataset, and on average. The proposed method without
over-segmentation did better than the proposed in the InStereo2K, IVYLAB, and Middlebury
datasets since superpixels obtained using over-segmentation sometimes overlap other
object boundaries due to high complex textures in the datasets, resulting in slightly
lower values. However, it is notable that only the proposed method improved for all
the datasets and achieved the highest average value in both subjective and objective
evaluations.
Fig. 4 shows how color consistency enhancement can improve 3D reconstruction results obtained
using a structure from motion (SfM) algorithm [4]. Since the background and the objects in our datasets 1 and 2 have less textures,
and a few images were used, the 3D scenes were partially reconstructed. The SfM algorithm
easily failed with the images with color inconsistent and thus resulted in very sparse
3D reconstruction. The 3D reconstructions with the color-corrected images obtained
using both the CT and the GC methods were also unsatisfactory.
More 3D points were produced using the images obtained using the OPT method as shown
in Fig. 4(e). However, textureless parts, including the wall, the floor, and the chairs, were
still sparse. In contrast, the 3D reconstructions after color correction by the PR
and the proposed methods were significantly improved.
The proposed method produced better results than the PR method by generating more
3D points for the textureless objects. It is notable that a similar amount of feature
matching was initially found in the SfM algorithm regardless of the color correction
method. However, the less consistent the color was, the more correspondences were
removed as outliers. Consequently, the most 3D points were generated when using the
resultant images of the proposed method.
Table 4 summarizes the execution times of the various methods for multi-view images on a
PC platform (2.4-GHz CPU and 32 GB of RAM). The best and second best values are represented
in bold and red, respectively. The CT method took the least amount of time overall
thanks to the smallest computations for calculating the standard deviation. The PR
method took about twice as long as the CT method except for the smallest image. This
exception is because feature extraction and matching were performed very fast in the
PR method. Since the GC method performs optimization to determine the gamma and linear
coefficients, it ran about three times slower than the CT method. The OPT method also
requires iterative optimization and thus is two times slower than the CT method.
The proposed method is the second fastest method and achieved 13\% higher efficiency
compared to the PR method. However, if the representative colors were obtained directly
clustering the original color distribution without the over-segmentation process,
the execution time increased by 39 times. This confirms that the over-segmentation
in the proposed method enhances the computational efficiency successfully.
In Fig. 5, the color correction methods are compared when applied for image stitching. Fig. 5(a) shows an image obtained by stitching images with different exposures. The CT method
did not effectively correct the image color, and the boundaries of the overlapping
areas were very noticeable. The GC and OPT methods changed color tones, but the visually
annoying boundaries still remained. The PR method and the proposed method provided
better but different results.
In Fig. 5(d), color difference was perceivable along the boundaries of images 1 and 2 obtained
by the PR method, especially on the wall of the building. The proposed method produced
more color consistent images, and the images were stitched seamlessly, as shown in
Fig. 5(f).
Fig. 4. 3D reconstruction results using: (a) color-inconsistent images; (b) images obtained by CT[6]; (c) images obtained by GC[7]; (d) images obtained by PR[8]; (e) images obtained by OPT[9]; (f) images obtained by the proposed method.
Fig. 5. Image stitching results using: (a) color-inconsistent input image; (b) images obtained by CT[6]; (c) images obtained by GC[7]; (d) images obtained by PR[8]; (e) images obtained by OPT[8]; (f) images obtained by the proposed method.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, an efficient color consistency enhancement method for multiple color-inconsistent
images was proposed. In contrast to the conventional methods to find color transfer
functions, the proposed method reformulated the color consistency enhancement problem
as a color distribution matching problem, so the color distribution of the source
image is transformed into that of the target image using the 3D point set registration.
Through the faithful simplification of the color distribution, the 3D non-rigid matching
is performed accurately and efficiently, which is suitable for consumer electronic
devices. It was confirmed that the proposed method achieves excellent performance
in color consistency enhancement both subjectively and objectively, and the proposed
representative color point cloud approximation enhances the computational efficiency
successfully.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the BK-21 FOUR program through National Research Foundation
of Korea (NRF) under the Ministry of Education.
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Author
Hyeonwoo Jeong received an M.S. degree in the Interdisciplinary Program in Creative
Engineering at KOREATECH, South Korea, in 2022. His research interests include SLAM,
image segmentation, and 3D data processing.
Dongkeun Kim is currently in the process of obtaining a B.S. degree in electronics
engineering from Korea University of Technology and Education (KOREATECH).
Kang-Sun Choi received a Ph.D. degree in nonlinear filter design in 2003, an M.S.
in 1999, and a B.S. in 1997 in electronic engineering from Korea University. In 2011,
he joined the School of Electrical, Electronics & Communication Engineering at Korea
University of Technology and Education, where he is currently a professor. In 2017,
he was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 2008
to 2010, he was a research professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at
Korea University. From 2005 to 2008, he worked in Samsung Electronics, Korea, as a
senior software engineer. From 2003 to 2005, he was a visiting scholar at the University
of Southern California. His research interests are in the areas of deep learning-based
semantic segmentation, multimodal sensor calibration, human-robot interaction, and
culture technology. He is a recipient of an IEEE International Conference on Consumer
Electronics Special Merit Award (2012).