• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.287-297
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• 2014

For several decades, many countries operating nuclear power plants have been studying the various disposal alternatives to dispose of the spent nuclear fuel or high-level radioactive waste safely. In this paper, as a direct disposal of spent nuclear fuels for deep geological disposal concept, the rod consolidation from spent fuel assembly for the disposal efficiency was considered and analyzed. To do this, a concept of spent fuel rod consolidation was described and the related concepts of disposal canister and disposal system were reviewed. With these concepts, several thermal analyses were carried out to determine whether the most important requirement of the temperature limit for a buffer material was satisfiedin designing an engineered barrier of a deep geological disposal system. Based on the results of thermal analyses, the deposition hole distance, disposal tunnel spacing and heat release area of a disposal canister were reviewed. And the unit disposal areas for each case were calculated and the disposal efficiencies were evaluated. This evaluation showed that the rod consolidation of spent nuclear fuel had no advantages in terms of disposal efficiency. In addition, the cooling time of spent nuclear fuels from nuclear power plant were reviewed. It showed that the disposal efficiency for the consolidated spent fuel rods could be improved in the case that cooling time was 70 years or more. But, the integrity of fuels and other conditions due to the longer term storage before disposal should be analyzed.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.6 s.312
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• pp.28-35
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• 2006

Statistical models of shape variability based on active shape models (ASMs) have been successfully utilized to perform segmentation and recognition tasks in two-dimensional (2D) images. Three-dimensional (3D) model-based approaches are more promising than 2D approaches since they can bring in more realistic shape constraints for recognizing and delineating the object boundary. For 3D model-based approaches, however, building the 3D shape model from a training set of segmented instances of an object is a major challenge and currently it remains an open problem in building the 3D shape model, one essential step is to generate a point distribution model (PDM). Corresponding landmarks must be selected in all1 training shapes for generating PDM, and manual determination of landmark correspondences is very time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic method for generating 3D statistical shape models. Given a set of training 3D shapes, we generate a 3D model by 1) building the mean shape fro]n the distance transform of the training shapes, 2) utilizing a tetrahedron method for automatically selecting landmarks on the mean shape, and 3) subsequently propagating these landmarks to each training shape via a distance labeling method. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy and compactness of the 3D model for the human liver built from 50 segmented individual CT data sets. The proposed method is very general without such assumptions and can be applied to other data sets.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.106-119
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• 2012

Roughness of rock joint has generally been characterized based upon geometrical aspects of a two-dimensional surface profile. The appropriate description of joint roughness, however, should consider the features of roughness mobilization at contact areas under normal and shear loads. In this study, direct shear tests were conducted on the replicas of tensile fractured gneiss joints and the influence of the shear direction on the shear behavior and effective roughness was examined. In this procedure, a joint surface was represented as a group of triangular planes, and the steepness of each plane was characterized using the concepts of the active and inactive micro-slope angles. The contact areas at peak strength which were estimated by a numerical method showed that the locations of the contact areas were mainly dependent on the distribution of the micro-slope angle and the shear behavior of joint was dominated by only the fractions with active micro-slope angles. Therefore, a three-dimensional coefficient for the quantification of rock joint roughness is proposed based on the distribution of active micro-slope angle: active roughness coefficient, $C_r$. Comparison of the active roughness coefficient and the peak shear strength obtained from the experiment suggests that the active roughness coefficient is the effective parameter to quantify the surface roughness and estimate the shear behavior of rock joint.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.31-43
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• 2000

This paper presents a novel algorithm lot extraction of the eye and mouth fields (facial features) from 2D gray level face images. First of all, it has been found that Eigenfeatures, derived from the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors of the binary edge data set constructed from the eye and mouth fields are very good features to locate these fields. The Eigenfeatures, extracted from the positive and negative training samples for the facial features, ate used to train a MultiLayer Perceptron(MLP) whose output indicates the degree to which a particular image window contains the eye or the mouth within itself. Second, to ensure robustness, the ensemble network consisting of multiple MLPs is used instead of a single MLP. The output of the ensemble network becomes the average of the multiple locations of the field each found by the constituent MLPs. Finally, in order to reduce the computation time, we extracted the coarse search region lot eyes and mouth by using prior information on face images. The advantages of the proposed approach includes that only a small number of frontal faces are sufficient to train the nets and furthermore, lends themselves to good generalization to non-frontal poses and even to other people's faces. It was also experimentally verified that the proposed algorithm is robust against slight variations of facial size and pose due to the generalization characteristics of neural networks.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.51-64
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• 2004

The purpose of this paper is to establish the Standard Korean Vocal Sound into Character Conversion Rule (Standard VSCC Rule) by reversely applying the Korean Standard Pronunciation Rule that regulates the way of reading written Hangeul sentences. The Standard VSCC Rule performs a crucially important role in Korean speech recognition. The general method of speech recognition is to find the most similar pattern among the standard voice patterns to the input voice pattern. Each of the standard voice patterns is an average of several sample voice patterns. If the unit of the standard voice pattern is a word, then the number of entries of the standard voice pattern will be greater than a few millions (taking inflection and postpositional particles into account). This many entries require a huge database and an impractically too many comparisons in the process of finding the most similar pattern. Therefore, the unit of the standard voice pattern should be a syllable. In this case, we have to resolve the problem of the difference between the Korean vocal sounds and the writing characters. The process of converting a sequence of Korean vocal sounds into a sequence of characters requires our Standard VSCC Rule. Making use of our Standard VSCC Rule, we have implemented a Korean vocal sounds into Hangeul character conversion system. The Korean Standard Pronunciation Rule consists of 30 items. In order to show soundness and completeness of our Standard VSCC Rule, we have tested the conversion system with various data sets reflecting all the 30 items. The test results will be presented in this paper.

• Journal of Dairy Science and Biotechnology
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.209-214
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• 2015

This study was carried out to investigate the effects of different milking systems (AMS, automatic milking system and CMS, conventional milking system) and of supplemental fat feeding on milk composition and milk fat characteristics. The composition, MFG (milk fat globule) size, fatty acids (FAs), and free fatty acids (FFAs) of the milk from 4 AMS and 4 CMS dairy farms were analyzed on the basis of the milking system and feeding of protected fat. The milking system did not affect milk composition, MFG size, and milk FAs, but FFA content of AMS milk were significantly higher than that of CMS milk. Feeding of protected fat resulted in the production of milk much higher in LCFAs (long chain FAs); however, the milk composition was not affected by fat supplementation. Cows administered protected fat supplements produced milk containing MFGs with a large average diameter.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.43 no.5 s.311
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• pp.89-100
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• 2006

The carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) is very important, because the severity of it is an independent predictor of transient cerebral ischemia, stroke, and coronary events such as myocardial infarction. The conventional image processing to measure the IMT has not been satisfactory, because the methods have relied on the manual section drawing and a regional segmentation by differential estimation. We propose a new image processing technology effective to extract features from the carotid artery image whose pixels have the directional vector properties with composed color distribution. The technique we presented here is not by differential variation but by verification of the layer properties of carotid artery image. Iterated vertical and horizontal analysis and segmentation of the IMT image show the vector characteristics. This new technique makes it possible to cluster the layers statistically, and to classify mathematical correlation between regions and resulting in correct measurements of thickness and its variation. The advantages and effectiveness of this approach are applicable to region process and character extraction of such a vector image.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.389-410
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• 1995

Large metropolitan areas in the US are distinguished by highly fragmented fiscally independent suburban municipalities and special districts. The suburban fragmentation implies the congregation of similar socio-economic groups escaped from central cities and the disparity of geographical resources among local government jurisdictions. This study examines St.Louis County suburbs as a case study for the implictions of suburban governmental fragmentation and the fiscal disparities across local governmental boundaries by analyzing their relationship with public service provision using police and public school services as examples. The distribution of fiscal resources across political boundaries, the processes which created them, and public service inequalities reproduced from the disparity of fiscal resources reveal the causes and consequences of suburban governmental fragmentation. The central part of suburban fragmentation is the segregation of public goods consumption reproduced from the disparity of local fiscal resources, and it acts as a basic geographical segregating force in the suburban spatial organization.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.14 no.6 s.53
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• pp.440-449
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• 2004

Rock mass includes natural discontinuities such as joints and faults during its formation. Discontinuities are also referred as planes of weakness because of their weak mechanical characteristics. In the design of underground structures, it is necessary to consider the properties of discontinuities to insure the stability. During the excavation of a tunnel, these discontinuities have to be identified as early as possible so that proper change in excavation method or support design can be made accordingly. The excavation of the tunnel in a stable rock mass causes a 3-dimensional arching effect around the excavation face. It was revealed by previous studies that the existence of a weak zone or a fault zone ahead of tunnel foe induces a typical displacement tendency of convergence. For better understanding of the meaning of influence/trend lines of various displacement components, three-dimensional numerical analyses were conducted while varying deformation moduli, thicknesses and orientations of discontinuities. Numerical results showed that the changes in influence/trend lines of various displacement components were very similar to those by measurements. The discrepancies from the expected values were dependent on the physical properties, thicknesses and orientations of discontinuities.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.10
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• pp.109-117
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• 2014

In navigation route planning systems using A* algorithms, the cardinality of an Open list, which is a list of candidate nodes through which a terminal node can be accessed, increases as the path length increases. In this paper, a method of alternately utilizing the Dijkstra's algorithm and the A* algorithm to reduce the cardinality of the Open list is investigated. In particular, by employing a depth parameter, named Level, the two algorithms are alternately performed depending on the Level's value. Using the hybrid searching approach, the Open list constructed in the Dijkstra's algorithm is transferred into the Open list of the A* algorithm, and consequently, the unconstricted increase of the cardinality of the Open list of the former algorithm can be avoided and controlled appropriately. In addition, an optimal or nearly optimal path similar to the Dijkstra's route, but not available in the A* algorithm, can be found. The experimental results, obtained with synthetic and real-life benchmark data, demonstrate that the computational cost, measured with the number of nodes to be compared, was remarkably reduced compared to the traditional searching algorithms, while maintaining the similar distance to those of the latter algorithms. Here, the values of Level were empirically selected. Thus, a study on finding the optimal Level values, while taking into consideration the actual road conditions remains open.