Patent ID: 8526722

Claim:
An apparatus for enhancing image quality of an image, the apparatus comprising: a region of interest (ROI) classifying unit classifying ROIs according to distances from an image capturing device with respect to the entire area of an input image captured by the image capturing device having an aperture with a plurality of openings employing different color filters by using a cluster-based image segmentation algorithm, the ROI classifying unit comprising: a salient region selecting unit selecting a salient region corresponding to an object by applying a K-means clustering scheme and a hill-climbing scheme to the input image; and an ROI labeling unit labeling blocks corresponding to the selected salient region among blocks segmented by using a block partitioning scheme, as ROIs; a color channel registering unit determining motion vectors of color channels corresponding to the respective ROIs by analyzing a high frequency component of image data included in the ROIs, and moving the color channels based on the determined motion vectors to obtain a registered image of the respective ROIs; an image fusing unit fusing the registered images of the respective ROIs to obtain a fused image; and a smoothing unit smoothing the border between the ROIs existing in the fused image to enhance image quality of the fused image.