• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.147-157
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• 2013

With the advent of the digital environment that can be accessed anytime, anywhere with the introduction of high-speed network, the free distribution and use of digital content were made possible. Ironically this environment is raising a variety of copyright infringement, and product images used in the online shopping mall are pirated frequently. There are many controversial issues whether shopping mall images are creative works or not. According to Supreme Court's decision in 2001, to ad pictures taken with ham products is simply a clone of the appearance of objects to deliver nothing but the decision was not only creative expression. But for the photographer's losses recognized in the advertising photo shoot takes the typical cost was estimated damages. According to Seoul District Court precedents in 2003, if there are the photographer's personality and creativity in the selection of the subject, the composition of the set, the direction and amount of light control, set the angle of the camera, shutter speed, shutter chance, other shooting methods for capturing, developing and printing process, the works should be protected by copyright law by the Court's sentence. In order to receive copyright protection of the shopping mall images by the law, it is simply not to convey the status of the product, the photographer's personality and creativity can be recognized that it requires effort. Accordingly, the cost of making the mall image increases, and the necessity for copyright protection becomes higher. The product images of the online shopping mall have a very unique configuration unlike the general pictures such as portraits and landscape photos and, therefore, the general image watermarking technique can not satisfy the requirements of the image watermarking. Because background of product images commonly used in shopping malls is white or black, or gray scale (gradient) color, it is difficult to utilize the space to embed a watermark and the area is very sensitive even a slight change. In this paper, the characteristics of images used in shopping malls are analyzed and a watermarking technology which is suitable to the shopping mall images is proposed. The proposed image watermarking technology divide a product image into smaller blocks, and the corresponding blocks are transformed by DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform), and then the watermark information was inserted into images using quantization of DCT coefficients. Because uniform treatment of the DCT coefficients for quantization cause visual blocking artifacts, the proposed algorithm used weighted mask which quantizes finely the coefficients located block boundaries and coarsely the coefficients located center area of the block. This mask improves subjective visual quality as well as the objective quality of the images. In addition, in order to improve the safety of the algorithm, the blocks which is embedded the watermark are randomly selected and the turbo code is used to reduce the BER when extracting the watermark. The PSNR(Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) of the shopping mall image watermarked by the proposed algorithm is 40.7~48.5[dB] and BER(Bit Error Rate) after JPEG with QF = 70 is 0. This means the watermarked image is high quality and the algorithm is robust to JPEG compression that is used generally at the online shopping malls. Also, for 40% change in size and 40 degrees of rotation, the BER is 0. In general, the shopping malls are used compressed images with QF which is higher than 90. Because the pirated image is used to replicate from original image, the proposed algorithm can identify the copyright infringement in the most cases. As shown the experimental results, the proposed algorithm is suitable to the shopping mall images with simple background. However, the future study should be carried out to enhance the robustness of the proposed algorithm because the robustness loss is occurred after mask process.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.48-57
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• 2015

In a sodium-cooled fast reactor, which is a Generation-IV reactor, refueling is conducted by rotating, but not opening, the reactor head to prevent a reaction between the sodium, water and air. Therefore, an inspection technique that checks for the presence of any obstacles between the reactor core and the upper internal structure, which could disturb the rotation of the reactor head, is essential prior to the refueling of a sodium-cooled fast reactor. To this end, an ultrasound-based inspection technique should be employed because the opacity of the sodium prevents conventional optical inspection techniques from being applied to the monitoring of obstacles. In this study, a ranging inspection technique using a plate-type ultrasonic waveguide sensor was developed to monitor the presence of any obstacles between the reactor core and the upper internal structure in the opaque sodium. Because the waveguide sensor installs an ultrasonic transducer in a relatively cold region and transmits the ultrasonic waves into the hot radioactive liquid sodium through a long waveguide, it offers better reliability and is less susceptible to thermal or radiation damage. A 10 m horizontal beam waveguide sensor capable of radiating an ultrasonic wave horizontally was developed, and beam profile measurements and basic experiments were carried out to investigate the characteristics of the developed sensor. The beam width and propagation distance of the ultrasonic wave radiated from the sensor were assessed based on the experimental results. Finally, a feasibility test using cylindrical targets (corresponding to the shape of possible obstacles) was also conducted to evaluate the applicability of the developed ranging inspection technique to actual applications.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.1-8
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a two-stage head tracking algorithm adequate for real-time active camera system having pan-tilt-zoom functions. In the color convergence stage, we first assume that the shape of a head is an ellipse and its model color histogram is acquired in advance. Then, the min-shift method is applied to roughly estimate a target position by examining the histogram similarity of the model and a candidate ellipse. To reflect the temporal change of object color and enhance the reliability of mean-shift based tracking, the target histogram obtained in the previous frame is considered to update the model histogram. In the updating process, to alleviate error-accumulation due to outliers in the target ellipse of the previous frame, the target histogram in the previous frame is obtained within an ellipse adaptively shrunken on the basis of the model histogram. In addition, to enhance tracking reliability further, we set the initial position closer to the true position by compensating the global motion, which is rapidly estimated on the basis of two 1-D projection datasets. In the subsequent stage, we refine the position and size of the ellipse obtained in the first stage by using shape information. Here, we define a robust shape-similarity function based on the gradient direction. Extensive experimental results proved that the proposed algorithm performs head hacking well, even when a person moves fast, the head size changes drastically, or the background has many clusters and distracting colors. Also, the propose algorithm can perform tracking with the processing speed of about 30 fps on a standard PC.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.294-307
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• 2013

Purpose : To investigate the correlations between Seoul Neuropsychological Screening Battery (SNSB) scores and the gray matter volumes (GMV) in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and cognitively normal (CN) elderly subjects with correcting the genotypes. Materials and Methods: Total 75 subjects were enrolled with 25 subjects for each group. The apolipoprotein E (APOE) epsilon genotypes, SNSB scores, and the 3D T1-weighted images were obtained from all subjects. Correlations between SNSB scores and GMV were investigated with the multiple regression method for each subject group using both voxel-based and region-of-interest-based analyses with covariates of age, gender, and the genotype. Results: In the AD group, Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT) delayed recall scores were positively correlated with GMV. In the MCI group, Seoul Verbal Learning Test (SVLT) scores were positively correlated with GMV. In the CN group, GMV negatively correlated with Boston Naming Test (K-BNT) scores and Mini-Mental State Examimation (K-MMSE) scores, but positively correlated with RCFT scores. Conclusion: When we used covariates of age, gender, and the genotype, we found statistically significant correlations between some SNSB scores and GMV at some brain regions. It may be necessary to further investigate a longitudinal study to understand the correlation.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.60-68
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• 2009

This work proposes a 10b 200MS/s 65nm CMOS ADC for high-definition video systems such as HDTV requiring high resolution and fast operating speed simultaneously. The proposed ADC employs a four-step pipeline architecture to minimize power consumption and chip area. The input SHA based on four capacitors reduces the output signal range from $1.4V_{p-p}$ to $1.0V_{p-p}$ considering high input signal levels at a low supply voltage of 1.2V. The proposed three-stage amplifiers in the input SHA and MDAC1 overcome the low output resistance problem as commonly observed in a 65nm CMOS process. The proposed multipath frequency-compensation technique enables the conventional RNMC based three-stage amplifiers to achieve a stable operation at a high sampling rate of 200MS/s. The conventional switched-bias power-reduction technique in the sub-ranging flash ADCs further reduces power consumption while the reference generator integrated on chip with optional off-chip reference voltages allows versatile system a locations. The prototype ADC in a 65nm CMOS technology demonstrates a measured DNL and INL within 0.19LSB and 0.61LSB, respectively. The ADC shows a maximum SNDR of 54.BdB and 52.4dB and a maximum SFDR of 72.9dB and 64.8dB at 150MS/S and 200MS/s, respectively. The proposed ADC occupies an active die area of $0.76mm^2$ and consumes 75.6mW at a 1.2V supply voltage.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.6-15
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• 2009

In this paper, a new 4-way search window is designed for the high-performance 2D PE architecture in H.264 Motion Estimation(ME) to improve the memory bandwidth. While existing 2D PE architectures reuse the overlapped data of adjacent search windows scanned in 1 or 3-way, the new window utilizes the overlapped data of adjacent search windows as well as adjacent multiple scanning (window) paths to enhance the reusage of retrieved search window data. In order to scan adjacent windows and multiple paths instead of single raster and zigzag scanning of adjacent windows, bidirectional row and column window scanning results in the 4-way(up. down, left, right) search window. The proposed 4-way search window could improve the reuse of overlapped window data to reduce the redundancy access factor by 3.1, though the 1/3-way search window redundantly requires $7.7{\sim}11$ times of data retrieval. Thus, the new 4-way search window scheme enhances the memory bandwidth by $70{\sim}58%$ compared with 1/3-way search window. The 2D PE architecture in H.264 ME for 4-way search window consists of $16{\times}16$ pe array. computing the absolute difference between current and reference frames, and $5{\times}16$ reusage array, storing the overlapped data of adjacent search windows and multiple scanning paths. The reference data could be loaded upward and downward into the new 2D PE depending on scanning direction, and the reusage array is combined with the pe array rotating left as well as right to utilize the overlapped data of adjacent multiple scan paths. In experiments, the new implementation of 4-way search window on Magnachip 0.18um could deal with the HD($1280{\times}720$) video of 1 reference frame, $48{\times}48$ search area and $16{\times}16$ macroblock by 30fps at 149.25MHz.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.200-213
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• 2008

H.264| MPEG-4 AVC is a new video codingstandard defined by JVT (Joint Video Team) which consists of ITU-T and ISO/IEC. Many techniques are adopted fur the compression efficiency: Especially, an intra prediction in an inter frame is one example but it leads to excessive amount of encoding time due to the decision of a candidate mode and a RDcost calculation. For this reason, a fast determination of the best intra prediction mode is the main issue for saving the encoding time. In this paper, by using the result of statistical relation between intra $16{\times}16$ and $4{\times}4$ intra predictions, the number of candidate modes for $4{\times}4$ intra prediction is reduced. Firstly, utilizing motion vector obtained after inter prediction, prediction of a block mode for each macroblock is made. If an intra prediction is needed, the correlation table between $16{\times}16$ and $4{\times}4$ intra predicted modes is created using the probability during each I frame-coding process. Secondly, using this result, the candidate modes for a $4{\times}4$ intra prediction that reaches a predefined specific probability value are only considered in the same GOP For the experiments, JM11.0, the reference software of H.264|MPEG-4 AVC is used and the experimental results show that the encoding time could be reduced by 51.24% in maximum with negligible amounts of PSNR drop and bitrate increase.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Radiology
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• v.5 no.5
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• pp.223-229
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• 2011

When negative electron in x-ray tube is accelerated in to a high speed and then the currency of the electron is blocked by the target, x-ray happens by the conversion of the energy. The real area where the fast accelerated electron collides to a target area is called actual focal spot. When the string focused size is observed at the central ray side, where the direction x-ray comes out, the size seems to be reduced. This focus is called effective focal spot. According to radiation angle of x-rays tube, the degree of the negative pole side presents higher value than inclination, the amount of exposed radiation that patient receives differs by the angle of positive pole, which means effective focal spot is the variable. This paper presents the correlation between size of effective focal spot and amount of exposed radiation to the patient by it, and effective research for homogenized dose dispersion by the size of effective focal spot. In conclusion, following the focal size, effective range which was -8cm ~ 0 cm on average, was found and average dose rate was 0.019 R/min. Through this range, for patients with small radiation exposure, image with good density and resolution in aspect of diagnosing will be able to be obtained.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.30-39
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• 2012

In this paper, a safe driving assistance system is proposed by detecting the status of driver's doze based on face and eye detection. By the level of the fatigue, safe driving system alarms or set the seatbelt on vibration. To reduce the effect of backward light and too strong solar light which cause a decrease of face and eye detection rate and false fatigue detection, post processing techniques like image equalization are used. Haar transform and PCA are used for face detection. By using the statistic of the face and eye structural ratio of normal Koreans, we can reduce the eye candidate area in the face, which results in reduction of the computational load. We also propose a new eye status detection algorithm based on Hough transform and eye width-height ratio, which are used to detect eye's blinking status which decides doze level by measuring the blinking period. The system alarms and operates seatbelt on vibration through controller area network(CAN) when the driver's doze level is detected. In this paper, four algorithms are implemented and proposed algorithm is made based on the probability model and we achieves 84.88% of correct detection rate through indoor and in-car environment experiments. And also we achieves 69.81% of detection rate which is better result than that of other algorithms using IR camera.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2014

In this study, the effect of velocity ratio and particle size on the flow mixing characteristics in the secondary combustor was investigated. Both PIV(Particle Image Velocimetry) technique and LES(Large Eddy Simulation) were applied. Two sizes of Polystyrene PIV seeding particle of 5 and $50{\mu}m$, and three velocity ratios of 5, 3, and 1.5 were considered. Results showed that the mixing of two air streams created reattachment and recirculation regions. The size of the recirculation region was decreased as the velocity ratio increased. For the larger particle cases, due to the increased momentum by the larger particles, the size of the recirculating regions were larger than that of the smaller particle cases and the effect of the velocity ratio was not as significant as in the smaller particle case.