Nonlinear Camera Response Functions and Image Deblurring
Sunyeong Kim1

Yu-Wing Tai1 Seon Joo Kim2 Michael S. Brown3 Yasuyuki Matsushita4
1
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)2SUNY Korea
3
National University of Singapore
4
Microsoft Research Asia

Abstract

the imaging process of Equation (1) can be considered as:
B

This paper investigates the role that nonlinear camera
response functions (CRFs) have on image deblurring. In
particular, we show how nonlinear CRFs can cause a spatially invariant blur to behave as a spatially varying blur.
This can result in noticeable ringing artifacts when deconvolution is applied even with a known point spread function(PSF). In addition, we show how CRFs can adversely affect
PSF estimation algorithms in the case of blind deconvolution. To help counter these effects, we introduce two methods to estimate the CRF directly from one or more blurred
images when the PSF is known or unknown. While not as
accurate as conventional CRF estimation algorithms basedon multiple exposures or calibration patterns, our approachis still quite effective in improving deblurring results in situations where the CRF is unknown.

Image deblurring is a long standing computer vision
problem for which the goal is to recover a sharp image froma blurred image. Mathematically, the problem is formulatedas:= K ⊗ I + n,(2)

where f (·) is the CRF. To remove the effect of the nonlinear
CRF from image deblurring, the image B has to be firstlinearized by the inverse CRF.
Contributions This paper offers two contributions with regards to CRFs and their role in image deblurring. First, we
provide a systematic analysis of the effect that a CRF has
on the blurring process and show how a nonlinear CRF canmake a spatially invariant blur behave as a spatially varying
blur around edges. This causes adverse performance in image deblurring methods that results in ringing artifacts aboutedges that cannot be completely eliminated by regularization. Our analysis also shows that PSF estimation for various blind deconvolution algorithms are adversely affectedby the nonlinear CRF. Our second contribution introduces
two algorithms to estimate the CRF from one or more images: the first method is based on a least-square formation
when the PSF is known; the second method is formulated
as a rank minimization problem when the PSF is unknown.
Both of these approaches exploit the relationship between
the blur profile about edges in a linearized image and the
PSF. While our estimation methods cannot compete withwell-defined radiometric calibration methods based on calibration patterns or multiple exposures, they are useful to
produce a sufficiently accurate CRF for improving deblurring results.

1. IntroductionB= f (K ⊗ I + n),(1)

where B is the captured blurred image, I is the latent image,
K is the point spread function (PSF), ⊗ is the convolution
operator, and n represents image noise.
One common assumption that is often taken for grantedis that the image B in Equation (1) responds in a linear
fashion with respect to irradiance, i.e., the amount of lightreceived by the sensor is proportional to the final image intensity. This assumption, however, is rarely valid due tononlinear camera response functions (CRFs). CRFs vary
among different camera manufacturers and models due todesign factors such as compressing the scene’s dynamic
range or to simulate conventional irradiance responses offilm [7, 17]. Taking this nonlinear response into account,

2. Related work
Image deblurring is a classic problem with well-studied
approaches including Richardson-Lucy [19, 22] and Wiener
deconvolution [29]. Recently, several different directions
were introduced to enhance the performance of deblurring.
These include methods that use image statistics [6, 13, 9],multiple images or hybrid imaging systems [1, 24, 25, 32],
and new blur models that account for camera motion [26,27, 28]. The vast majority of these methods, however, do
1Linear CRF (kernel A)

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Figure 1. This figure shows a simple step edge image that has been blurred by two different PSF kernels: a 1D motion PSF with uniform
speed (kernel A) and a 1D PSF with non-uniform speed (kernel B). These blurred images are transformed with a linear CRF (a)(c), and witha nonlinear CRF (b)(d). The 1D PSF and the 1D slice of intensity values are also shown. (e)-(h) show non-blind deconvolution results of(a)-(d) using Wiener filter. (i)-(l) show non-blind deconvolution results of (a)-(d) using an iterative re-weighting method [14] with sparsity
regularization.

not consider the nonlinearity in the imaging process due to
CRFs.
The goal of radiometric calibration is to compute a CRF
from a given set of images or a single image. The most accurate radiometric calibration algorithms use multiple images with different exposures [5, 7, 10, 18, 12]. Our work ismore related to single-image based radiometric calibration
techniques [16, 17, 21, 20, 30]. In [16], the CRF is computed by observing the color distributions of local edge regions: the CRF is computed as the mapping that transforms
nonlinear distributions of edge colors into linear distributions. This idea is further extended to deal with a single
gray-scale image using histograms of edge regions in [17].
In [30], a CRF is estimated by temporally mixing of a stepedge within a single camera exposure by the linear motion blur of a calibration pattern. Unlike [30], however, ourmethod deals with uncontrolled blurred images.
To the best of our knowledge, there are only a handful ofprevious works that consider CRFs in the context of image
deblurring. Examples include work by Fergus et al. [6],where images are first linearized by an inverse gammacorrection with γ = 2.2. Real world CRFs, however, areoften drastically different from gamma curves [7, 15]. Another example by Lu et al. [18] involves reconstructing ahigh dynamic range image from a set of differently exposed
and possibly motion blurred images. Recent work by Cho etal. [3] discussed nonlinear CRFs as a cause for artifacts indeblurring, but provided little insight into why such artifacts arise. Their work suggested to avoid this by using a
pre-calibrated CRF or the camera’s RAW output. Whilea pre-calibrated CRF is undoubtedly the optimal solution,
the CRF may not always be available. Moreover, work by
Chakrabarti et al. [2] suggests that a CRF may be scene dependent when the camera is in “ auto mode”. Recent work
by Lin et al. [15] showed that the CRF for a given camera may vary for different camera picture styles (e.g., landscape, portrait, etc).
Our work aims to provide more insight into the effectthat CRFs have on the image deblurring process. In addition, we seek to provide a method to estimate a CRF froma blurred input image in the face of a missing or unreliable
pre-calibrated CRF.

3. Effects of the CRF in image deblurring
To focus our analysis, we follow previous work by assuming that the image noise is negligible (i.e., n ≈ 0 in
Equation (2)) and that the PSF is spatially invariant.

3.1. Effects on PSF and image deconvolution
We begin our analysis using synthetic examples shownin Figure 1. An image with three different intensity levels(Black, Gray, and White) is blurred with 1D motion PSFs
with uniform speed (kernel A) and non-uniform speed (kernel B) to generate the observations in Figure 1 (a)(b) and

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marginal
probabilityed

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Figure 2. This figure illustrates the problem when the image intensities are re-mapped according to different part of the camera
response function. Two identical edge profiles at different intensity ranges are re-mapped to have different shapes.

θ

edge
profileFigure 4. This figure shows how the edge profile of a step edge in a
motion blurred image is equal to the cumulative distribution function of the marginal probability of the motion blur kernel along thedirection perpendicular to the edge.

icantly larger than the one with the linear CRF. The use ofimage regularization [14] helps to reduce the ringing artifacts, but the regularization is less effective in the case of anonlinear CRF even with a very large regularization weight.
Hence, the CRF plays a significant role in quality of the image deblurring.

3.2. Effects on PSF estimation

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 3. This figure shows examples of PSF kernels from several
images with linear CRF (left columns) or nonlinear CRF (rightcolumns). PSF kernels in the same row of (a)-(d) are from thesame image with different estimated methods: (a) Fergus et al. [6];(b) Shan et al. [23]; (c) Xu and Jia [31]; (d) Cho et al. [4].

Figure 1 (c)(d) respectively. A real CRF 1 is used to nonlinearly re-map the image intensity in Figure 1 (b)(d) after
convolution.
In this example, we can observe how the blur profilesof an image becomes spatially varying after the nonlinear
re-mapping of image intensities even though the underlying
motion PSF is spatially invariant. With a linear CRF, theblur profile from the black to gray region (first step edge) is
the same as the blur profile from the gray to white region(second step edge) as shown in Figure 1 (a)(c). However,with a nonlinear CRF, the two blur profiles become different
as shown in Figure 1 (b)(d). This is because the slope andthe curvature of the CRF are different for different range ofintensities. Figure 2 helps to illustrate this effect.
To examine the effect that these cases have on image
deblurring, we performed non-blind deconvolution on thesynthetic images as shown in the second and third rows ofFigure 1. The second row shows the results of Wiener filtering [29] while the third row shows the results of [14] withsparsity regularization. Without using any regularization,
the deblurring results of both the linear and nonlinear CRF
contain ringing artifacts due to the zero component of the
PSF in the frequency domain. However, the magnitude ofthese ringing artifacts in the nonlinear CRF result is signif1 Pre-calibrated CRF of a Cannon G5 camera in standard mode is used.

We also analyze the effects of a CRF on the PSF estimation by comparing the estimated PSF between a linear andnonlinear CRF. We show the estimated PSFs from Fergus etal. [6], Shan et al. [23], Xu and Jia [31] and Cho et al. [4] inFigure 3. The raw images from [4] were used for our testing
purpose.
Ideally, the CRF should only affect the relative intensityof a PSF, but the shape of a PSF should remain the same
since the shape of the PSF describes the trajectory of motion causing the motion blur, and the intensity of the PSF
describes the relative speed of the motion. However, as we
can observe in Figure 3, the estimated PSFs are noticeably
different, especially for the results from [6] and [23]. Thisis because both [6] and [23] use alternating optimization
for their non-blind deconvolution. As previously discussed,
the nonlinear CRF causes errors during the deconvolution
process which in turn propagates the errors to the estimatedPSF in an alternating optimization framework. The resultsfrom [31] and [4] contains less errors because they separate the process of PSF estimation and image deconvolution. However, the shape of the estimated PSF are still
different. The method in [31] requires edge selection andsharpening, and the method in [4] requires edge profiles tobe aligned. Since the nonlinear CRF alters the edge profiles in the blurred image, their estimated PSF also contains
errors inherent from non-uniform edge profiles. Note that
small errors in PSF estimation can causes significant artifacts in subsequent deconvolution.

4. CRF approximation from a blurred image
In this section, we describe a method to estimate the CRF
from one or more blurred images. To begin, we examine therelationship between the PSF and edge profiles in a blurred
image under a linear CRF assumption. We then describe amethod to estimate the CRF based on this relationship using
least-squares fitting assuming a known PSF. This method isthen converted to a robust estimation of an unknown PSF
and a CRF using rank minimization.

4.1. PSF and edge profiles
We begin with the observation that the shape of a blur
profile with the linear CRF resembles the shape of the
cumulative distribution of the 1D PSF as shown in Figure 1 (a)(c). Our analysis is similar in fashion to that in[9] which used alpha mattes of blurred object to estimate the
PSF. Our approach, however, works directly from the image
intensities and requires no matting or object extraction. Instead, we only need to identify the step edges with homogeneous areas on both sides. For such edges, the shape of theblur profile is equal to the shape of the cumulative distribution of the 1D PSF. Consider a simple case where the original step edge has values [0, . . . , 0, 1, . . . , 1] and the valuesof the PSF is [α1 , α2 , . . . , αM ]. If the number of 0’s and 1’s
are both larger than M , the blurafter the motion blur
PprofileM
is equal to [α1 , α1 + α2 , . . . , i=1 αi ], which is the cumulative distribution of the 1D PSF. For any edges with intensities [I1 , I2 ], the value of the P
blur profile at m ∈ [1, . . . , M ]mafter the blur is equal to I1 + i=1 αi (I2 − I1 ). In the caseof a 2D PSF this observation still holds when the edge is astraight line. In this case, the 1D PSF becomes the marginal
probability of the 2D PSF projected onto the line perpendicular to the edge direction as illustrated in Figure 4.

4.2. CRF approximation with a known PSF
Considering that the shape of blurred edge profiles areequal to the shape of the cumulative distribution of the PSF2
if the CRF is linear, if we are given the PSF, we can compute
the CRF as follows:
!2
m
M
E1 X
X
g(Ij (m)) − lj X
αi−wj
argminwjg(·)
i=1
j=1 m=1
!2
E2 X
M
M
X
X
g(Ij (m)) − lj+wj
αi , (3)−wj
j=1 m=1
i=mwhere g(·) = f −1 (·) is the inverse CRF function, E1 andE2 are the numbers of selected blurred edge profiles fromdark to bright regions and from bright region to dark regions, respectively.
The variables lj and wj are the minimum intensity value
and the intensity range (intensity difference between the
maximum and the minimum intensity values) of the blurrededge profiles after applying the inverse CRF. Blur profiles
that span a wider intensity range are weighted more because
2 For simplicity, we assume that the PSF is 1D, and it is well alignedwith the edge orientation. If the PSF is 2D, we can compute the marginal
probability of the PSF.

their wider dynamic range covers a larger portion of g(·),
and therefore provide more information about the shape ofg(·).
We follow the method in [30] and model the inverse CRF
g(·) using a polynomial of degree d = 5 with coefficientsPd
ap , i.e., g(I) = p=0 ap I p . The optimization is subject toboundary constraints g(0) = 0 and g(1) = 1, and a monotonicity constraint that enforces the first derivative of g(·) tobe non-negative. Our goal is to find the coefficients ap suchthat the following objective function is minimized:
Pd

E1 X
M
X
argminwj
ap

p
p=0 ap Ij (m) − lj

j=1 m=1

+

E2 X
M
X

Pd

+λ2

wj



d
X

255
X

d
X

r=1

H

i=1

p

p=0 ap Ij (m)j=1 m=1+λ1 a20 +

wj

p=0

ap

p=0

− lj

wj
!2 

ap − 1


m
X
− αi

r−1
255

p

M
X
− αi
i=m



−

!2
!2

!
 r p 
255,(4)

where H is the Heviside step function for enforcing themonotonicity constraint, i.e., H = 1 if g(r) < g(r − 1),
or H = 0 otherwise. The weights are fixed to λ1 = 100
and λ2 = 10, which control the boundary constraint and themonotonic constraint, respectively. The solution of Equation (4) can be obtained by a simplex search method of Lagarias et al. [11]3 .

4.3. CRF estimation with unknown PSF
Using the cumulative distribution of the PSF can reliably estimate the CRF under ideal conditions. However, thePSF is usually unknown in practice. As we have studied in
Section 3.2, nonlinear CRF affects the accuracy of the PSF
estimation, which in turn will affect our CRF estimation described in Section 4.2. In this section, we introduce a CRF
estimation method without explicitly computing the PSF.
As previously discussed, we want to find an inverse response function g(·) that makes the blurred edge profiles
have the same shape after applying the inverse CRF. Thiscan be achieved by minimizing the distance between eachblur profile to the average blur profile:argmin
g(·)

E1 X
M
X

wj



2
g(Ij (m)) − lj
− A1 (m)
wj

wj



2
g(Ij (m)) − lj
− A2 (m) , (5)wj

j=1 m=1

+

E2 X
M
X

j=1 m=1

3 fminsearch function in Matlab.

PE1 wk
where A1 (m) =k=1 W g(Ik (m)) is the weighted avPE1
erage blur profile, and W =l=1 wl is a normalization
factor.
Using the constraint in Equation (5), we can compute the
CRF, however, this approach is unreliable not only because
the constraint in Equation (5) is weaker than the constraint
in Equation (3), but the nature of least-squares fitting is very
sensitive to outliers. To avoid these problems, we generalize our method to robust estimation via rank minimization.
Since the CRF of images from the same camera is the same,our generalized method can be extended to handle multiple
motion blurred images which allow us to achieve accurate
CRF estimation even without knowing the PSF.
Recall that the edge profiles should have the same shapeafter applying the inverse CRF. This means that if the CRF
is linear, the edge profiles are linearly dependent with eachother, and hence the observation matrix of edge profiles
form a rank-1 matrix for each group of edge profiles:g(I1 (1)) − l1···g(I1 (M )) − l1


..
..
..
g(M)=
 ,(6).
.
.
g(IE1 (1)) − lE1

g(IE1 (M )) − lE1···

where M is length of edge profiles, and E1 is the numberof observed edge profiles grouped according to the orientation of edges. Now, we transform the problem into a rank
minimization problem which finds a function g(·) that minimizes the rank of the observation matrix M of edge profiles.
Since the CRF is the same for the whole image, we define
our objective function for rank minimization as follow:
arg ming(·)

KX

wk rank(g(Mk )),

(7)

k=1

where K is total number of observation matrix (total number of group of edge profiles), wk is a weight given to eachobservation matrix. We assign larger weight to the observation matrix that contains more edge profiles. Note that
Equation (7) is also applicable to multiple images since theobservation matrix are built individually for each edge orientation and for each input image.
We evaluate the rank of matrix M by measuring the ratio
of its singular values:
argmin
g(·)

K
X

wk

k=1

Ek
X
σkj
j=2

σk1

,

(8)

where σkj are the singular values of g(M)k . If the observation matrix is rank-1, only the first singular values isnonzero and hence minimizes Equation (8). In our experiments, we found that Equation (8) can be simplified to justmeasuring the ratio of the first two singular values:
argmin
g(·)

K
X

k=1

wk

σk2
.
σk1

(9)

Combining the monotonic constraint, the boundary constraint and the polynomial function constraint from Equation (4), we obtain our final objective function:

!2 
K
d
X
X
σk2
+ λ1 a20 +wk
argminap − 1  (10)
σk1
ap
p=0
k=1
p 
!

255
d
X
X
r p
r−1
.
−
+λ2
H
ap
255
255
r=1
p=0
Equation (10) can be solved effectively using nonlinear
least-squares fitting4 .

4.4. Implementation issues for 2D PSF
Our two proposed methods for CRF estimation are basedon the 1D blur profile analysis. Since, in practice, PSFs are
2D in nature, we need to group image edges with similar
orientation and select valid edge samples for building theobservation matrix. We use the method in [4] to select theblurred edges. Method in [4] filters edges by only keeping
high contrast straight-line edges. After we select valid edge
profiles, we group the edge profiles according to edge orientations. In [4], edges were aligned according to the centerof mass. In our case, however, to deal to the nonlinear CRF
effects, alignment based on the center of mass is not reliable. We instead align the edge profiles by aligning the two
end points of edges.
Our method uses a nonlinear least-squares fitting for therank minimization. This method can be sensitive to the initial estimation of the CRF. In our implementation, we use
the average CRF profile from the database of response functions (DoRF) created by Grossberg and Nayar [8] as our
initial guess. The DoRF database contains 201 measured
functions which allows us to obtain a good local minima inpractice.

5. Experimental results
In this section, we evaluate the performance of our CRF
estimation method using both synthetic and real examples.
In the synthetic examples, we test our algorithm under different conditions in order to better understand the behaviors
and the limitations of our method. In the real examples,
we evaluate our method by comparing the amount of ringing artifacts with and without CRF intensity correction todemonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm and the importance of CRF in the context of image deblurring.

5.1. Synthetic examples
Figure 5 shows the performance of our CRF estimation
under different conditions. We first test the effects of theintensity range of the blur profiles in Figure 5 (a). In a real
4 lsqnonlin function in Matlab.

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Figure 5. We test the robustness of our CRF estimation method under different configurations. (a) Blur profiles with different intensity
ranges, (b) edges in the original image contains mixed intensities (edge width is equal to 3 pixels), (c) Gaussian noise (σ = 0.02) is added
according to Equation (2), (d) the union of intensity range of all blur profiles does not cover the whole CRF curve. (e) Blur profiles of (a),(b), (c), (d). The original image (black lines), the blurred image with linear CRF (red lines), and the blurred image with nonlinear CRF(blue lines) are shown on top of each figure in (a)-(d). (f)-(i) the corresponding estimated inverse CRF using our methods with (a)-(d). (j)the corresponding estimated inverse CRF with multiple images in (e).

application, it is uncommon that all edges will have a similar intensity range. These intensity range variations canpotentially affect the estimated CRF as low dynamic range
edges usually contain larger quantization errors. As shownin Figure 5 (f), our method is reasonably robust to these intensity range variations.
Our method assumes that the original edges are stepedges. In practice, there may be color mixing effect evenfor an edge that is considered as a sharp edge. In our experiments, we find that the performance of our approach
degrades quickly if the step edge assumption is violated.
However, as shown in Figure 5 (g), our approach is still effective if the color mixing effects is less than 3 pixel width
given a PSF with size 15. The robustness of our method
when edge color mixing is present depends on the size of
PSF with our approach being more effective for larger PSFs.
Noise is inevitable even when the ISO of a camera ishigh. We test the robustness of our method against image noise in Figure 5 (c). We add Gaussian noise to Equation (2) where the noise is added after the convolution process but before the CRF mapping. As can be observed in
Figure 5 (h), the noise affects the accuracy of our method.
In fact, using the model in Equation (2), we can observe thatthe noise has also captured some characteristics of the CRF.
The magnitude of noise in the darker region is larger thanthe magnitude of noise in the brighter region. Such information may even be useful and combined into our framework
to improve the performance of our algorithm as discussed
in [20].
We test the sensitivity of our algorithm if the union ofblur profiles does not cover the whole range of CRF. As we
can be seen in Figure 5 (i), our method still gives reasonableestimations. This is because the polynomial and monotonic-

ity constraint assist in maintaining the shape of CRF. Notethat having limited range of intensities will degrade the performance of all radiometric calibration methods.
Finally, we show a result where we use all input images
to estimate the CRF. As expected, more input images give amore accurate CRF estimation.
Among all the synthetic experiments, we found that theperformance of our method depends on the quality of theblur profiles and not only the quantity of observed blur profiles. For instance, a blur profile with a large motion covering a wide intensity range is better than the combination ofblur profiles that cover only a portion of intensity range.
When combining the observations from multiple images,
our estimated CRF is more accurate as the mutual information from different images increase the robustness of ouralgorithm. The rank minimization also makes our algorithm
less sensitive to outliers.

5.2. Real examples
We test our method using real examples in Figure 6.
Since the goal of this work is to understand the role of the
CRF in the context of image deblurring, and hence to improve the performance of existing deblurring algorithm, we
evaluate our method by comparing the amount of ringing
artifacts in the deblurred image in addition to the accuracyof our estimated CRF.
We estimate the inverse CRF using the method in Section 4.3. Although we can include the PSF information into
our estimation, as discussed in Section 4.3, it is possiblethat the errors in the PSF would be propagated to the CRF.
We therefore separate the CRF estimation step and the PSF
estimation step. The accuracy of our estimated CRF for thereal examples does not depend on the PSF estimation algo-

1

Ground Truth
Our Estimated CRF
with Single Image
Our Estimated CRF
with multiple Images
Inverse Gamma-Correction

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Our Estimated CRF
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Our Estimated CRF
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Inverse Gamma-Correction

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Our Estimated CRF
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Our Estimated CRF
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Inverse Gamma-Correction

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(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Figure 6. Our result with real examples: (a) input images; (b) estimated CRFs; (c) deblurred images with gamma correction; (d) deblurred
images with CRF correction.

rithm. In our implementation, we choose the method in [31]to estimate the PSF and the method in [14] with sparsity
regularization for deconvolution.
Figure 6 show the results from the input image in (a) thatis captured by Canon EOS 400D (first row) and a Nikon
D90 DSLR (second and third rows) camera with a nonlinear
CRF. The results in (b) are the estimated CRF using single
and multiple images. The ground truth CRFs were computed by using method in [12] with calibration pattern. For
reference, we have also show the inverse gamma-correction
curve with γ equal to 2.2. This is the common method suggested by previous deblurring algorithm [6] when the CRF
is nonlinear. Note the shape of inverse gamma-correction
curve is very different from the shape of ground truth andour estimated CRF. We compare the results with gamma
correction (γ = 2.2) and with our estimated CRF corrections in (c) and (d) respectively. As expected, our resultswith CRF corrections are better – not only do the deblurring results contain less artifacts, but the estimated PSFs arealso more accurate after CRF correction.

sented an analysis on the role that nonlinear CRFs play inimage deblurring. We showed that a nonlinear CRF canchange a spatially invariant blur into one that is spatiallyvarying. This caused notable ringing artifacts in the deconvolution process which cannot be completely ameliorated
by image regularization. We also demonstrated how the
nonlinear CRF adversely affects PSF estimation for several
state-of-the-art techniques. In Section 4, we discussed how
the shape of edge projections resemble the cumulative distribution function of 1D PSFs for linear CRFs. This observation was used to formulate two CRF estimation strategies
for when the motion blur PSF kernel is known or not known.
In the latter case, we showed how rank minimization can beused to provide a robust estimation. Experimental results
in real examples demonstrated the importance of intensity
linearization in the context of image deblurring. For future
work we are interested to see if our approach can be extended to images with spatially varying motion blur such as
camera rotational blur [27].

7. Acknowledgement
6. Discussion and summary
This paper offers two contributions targeting image deblurring in the face of nonlinear CRFs. First, we have pre-This research is supported in part by the MKE, Korea andMicrosoft Research, under the IT/SW Creative Research
Program supervised by the NIPA (NIPA- 2011-C1810-

1102-0014), the National Research Foundation (NRF) of
Korea (2011-0013349), and Singapore Academic Research
Fund (AcRF) Tier 1 FRC grant (Project No. R-252-000423-112).

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