• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.402-410
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• 2006

This paper presents a method for feature based block motion estimation that uses multi -resolution image sequences to obtain the panoramic images in the continuous ultrasound image sequences. In the conventional block motion estimation method, the centers of motion estimation blocks are set at the predetermined and equally spaced locations. This requires the large blocks to include at least one feature, which inevitably requires long estimation time. In this paper, we propose an adaptive method which locates the center of the motion estimation blocks at the feature points. This make it possible to reduce the block size while keeping the motion estimation accuracy The Harris-Stephen corner detector is used to get the feature points. The comer points tend to group together, which cause the error in the global motion estimation. In order to distribute the feature points as evenly as Possible, the image is firstly divided into regular subregions, and a strongest corner point is selected as a feature in each subregion. The ultrasound Images contain speckle patterns and noise. In order to reduce the noise artifact and reduce the computational time, the proposed method use the multi-resolution image sequences. The first algorithm estimates the motion in the smoothed low resolution image, and the estimated motion is prolongated to the next higher resolution image. By this way the size of search region can be reduced in the higher resolution image. Experiments were performed on three types of ultrasound image sequences. These were shown that the proposed method reduces both the computational time (from 77ms to 44ms) and the displaced frame difference (from 66.02 to 58.08).

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.30 no.7_8
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• pp.672-680
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• 2003

A shopbot is a software agent whose goal is to maximize buyer´s satisfaction through automatically gathering the price and quality information of goods as well as the services from on-line sellers. In the response to shopbots´ activities, sellers on the Internet need the agents called pricebots that can help them maximize their own profits. In this paper we adopts Q-learning, one of the model-free reinforcement learning methods as a price-setting algorithm of pricebots. A Q-learned agent increases profitability and eliminates the cyclic price wars when compared with the agents using the myoptimal (myopically optimal) pricing strategy Q-teaming needs to select a sequence of state-action fairs for the convergence of Q-teaming. When the uniform random method in selecting state-action pairs is used, the number of accesses to the Q-tables to obtain the optimal Q-values is quite large. Therefore, it is not appropriate for universal on-line learning in a real world environment. This phenomenon occurs because the uniform random selection reflects the uncertainty of exploitation for the optimal policy. In this paper, we propose a Mixed Nonstationary Policy (MNP), which consists of both the auxiliary Markov process and the original Markov process. MNP tries to keep balance of exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning. Our experiment results show that the Q-learning agent using MNP converges to the optimal Q-values about 2.6 time faster than the uniform random selection on the average.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.9B no.2
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• pp.139-146
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• 2002

The robot soccer simulation game is a dynamic multi-agent environment. In this paper we suggest a new reinforcement learning approach to each agent's dynamic positioning in such dynamic environment. Reinforcement learning is the machine learning in which an agent learns from indirect, delayed reward an optimal policy to choose sequences of actions that produce the greatest cumulative reward. Therefore the reinforcement learning is different from supervised learning in the sense that there is no presentation of input-output pairs as training examples. Furthermore, model-free reinforcement learning algorithms like Q-learning do not require defining or learning any models of the surrounding environment. Nevertheless these algorithms can learn the optimal policy if the agent can visit every state-action pair infinitely. However, the biggest problem of monolithic reinforcement learning is that its straightforward applications do not successfully scale up to more complex environments due to the intractable large space of states. In order to address this problem, we suggest Adaptive Mediation-based Modular Q-Learning (AMMQL) as an improvement of the existing Modular Q-Learning (MQL). While simple modular Q-learning combines the results from each learning module in a fixed way, AMMQL combines them in a more flexible way by assigning different weight to each module according to its contribution to rewards. Therefore in addition to resolving the problem of large state space effectively, AMMQL can show higher adaptability to environmental changes than pure MQL. In this paper we use the AMMQL algorithn as a learning method for dynamic positioning of the robot soccer agent, and implement a robot soccer agent system called Cogitoniks.

• Journal of KIISE:Information Networking
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.514-524
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• 2007

Recent advances in the speed of multi-rate wireless local area networks (WLANs) and the proliferation of WLAN devices have made rate adaptive, opportunistic scheduling critical for throughput optimization. As WLAN traffic evolves to be more symmetric due to the emerging new applications such as VoWLAN, collaborative download, and peer-to-peer file sharing, opportunistic scheduling at the downlink becomes insufficient for optimized utilization of the single shared wireless channel. However, opportunistic scheduling on the uplink of a WLAN is challenging because wireless channel condition is dynamic and asymmetric. Each transmitting client has to probe the access point to maintain the updated channel conditions at the access point. Moreover, the scheduling decisions must be coordinated at all clients for consistency. This paper presents JUDS, a joint uplink/downlink opportunistic scheduling for WLANs. Through synergistic integration of both the uplink and the downlink scheduling, JUDS maximizes channel diversity at significantly reduced scheduling overhead. It also enforces fair channel sharing between the downlink and uplink traffic. Through extensive QualNet simulations, we show that JUDS improves the overall throughput by up to 127% and achieves close-to-perfect fairness between uplink and downlink traffic.

• Journal of KIISE:Information Networking
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.493-504
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• 2007

With the advance and proliferation of computer and wireless network technology, it is common to access to network through the wireless network using mobile device. The ratio of using the streaming media out of many applications through the network is increasing not only in the wired network but also in the wireless network. The streaming media is much bigger than other contents and requires more network bandwidth to communicate and more computing resources to process. However the mobile devices have relatively poor computing resource and low network bandwidth. If the streaming media service is provided for mobile devices without any consideration about the network bandwidth and computing power, it is difficult for the client to get the service of high quality. Since especially mobile devices are supported with very limited energy capacity from the battery, the streaming media service should be adjusted to the varying energy state of mobile devices to ensure the complete playback of streaming media. In this paper, we propose a new method to guarantee the complete playback time of the streaming media for the mobile clients by dynamically controlling transmitted frame rate to the client according to the estimated available time of mobile device using battery model reflecting the characteristic of the battery. Since the proposed method controls the number of frames transmitting to the client according to the energy state of the mobile device, the complete playback time is guaranteed to mobile clients.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.121-128
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• 2003

Acoustic Echo Cancellation(m) is very active research topic having many applications like teleconference and hands-free communication and it employs Double Talk Detector(DTD) to indicate whether the near-end speaker is active or not. However. the DTD is very sensitive to the variation of acoustical environment and it sometimes provides wrong information about the near-end speaker. In this paper, we are focusing on the development of robust DTD algorithm which is a basic building block for reliable AEC system. The proposed AEC system consists of delayless subband AEC and narrow-band DTD. Delayless subband AEC has proven to have excellent performance of echo cancellation with a low complexity and high convergence speed. In addition, it solves the signal delay problem in the existing subband AEC. On the other hand, the proposed narrowband DTD is operating on low frequency subband. It can take most advantages from the narrow subband such as a low computational complexity due to the down-sampling and the reliable DTD decision making procedure because of the low-frequency nature of the subband signal. From the simulation results of the proposed narrowband DTD and wideband DTD, we confirm that the proposed DTD outperforms the wideband DTD in a sense of removing possible false decision making about the near-end speaker activity.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.43 no.10 s.352
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• pp.79-89
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• 2006

TCP is the most widely used transport protocol in Internet applications that guarantees a reliable data transfer. But, in the wireless multi-hop networks, TCP performance is degraded because it is designed for wired networks. The main reasons of TCP performance degradation are contention for wireless medium at the MAC layer, hidden terminal problem, exposed terminal problem, packet losses in the link layer, unfairness problem, reordering problem caused by path disconnection, bandwidth waste caused by exponential backoff of retransmission timer due to node's mobility and so on. Specially, in the mobile ad-hoc networks, discrepancy between a station's transmission range and interference range produces hidden terminal problem that decreases TCP performance greatly by limiting simultaneous transmission at a time. In this paper, we propose a new MAC algorithm for mobile ad-hoc networks to solve the problem that a node can not transmit and just increase CW by hidden terminal. In the IEEE 802.11 MAC DCF, a node increases CW exponentially when it fails to transmit, but the proposed algorithm, changes CW adaptively according to the reason of failure so we get a TCP performance enhancement. We show by ns-2 simulation that the proposed algorithm enhances the TCP performance by fairly distributing the transmission opportunity to the failed nodes by hidden terminal problems.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.209-220
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• 2004

The main feature of H.264 standard against conventional video standards is the high coding efficiency and the network friendliness. In spite of these outstanding features, it is not easy to implement H.264 codec as a real-time system due to its high requirement of memory bandwidth and intensive computation. Although the variable block size motion compensation using multiple reference frames is one of the key coding tools to bring about its main performance gain, it demands substantial computational complexity due to SAD (Sum of Absolute Difference) calculation among all possible combinations of coding modes to find the best motion vector. For speedup of motion estimation process, therefore, this paper proposes fast algorithms for both integer-pel and fractional-pel motion search. Since many conventional fast integer-pel motion estimation algorithms are not suitable for H.264 having variable motion block sizes, we propose the motion field adaptive search using the hierarchical block structure based on the diamond search applicable to variable motion block sizes. Besides, we also propose fast fractional-pel motion search using small diamond search centered by predictive motion vector based on statistical characteristic of motion vector.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.187-187
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• 2004

In this paper, we present an efficient architecture of a versatile Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder which can be programmed to decode RS codes continuously with my message length k as well as any block length n. This unique feature eliminates the need of inserting zeros for decoding shortened RS codes. Also, the values of the parameters n and k, hence the error-correcting capability t can be altered at every codeword block. The decoder permits 3-step pipelined processing based on the modified Euclid's algorithm (MEA). Since each step can be driven by a separate clock, the decoder can operate just as 2-step pipeline processing by employing the faster clock in step 2 and/or step 3. Also, the decoder can be used even in the case that the input clock is different from the output clock. Each step is designed to have a structure suitable for decoding RS codes with varying block length. A new architecture for the MEA is designed for variable values of the t. The operating length of the shift registers in the MEA block is shortened by one, and it can be varied according to the different values of the t. To maintain the throughput rate with less circuitry, the MEA block uses both the recursive technique and the over-clocking technique. The decoder can decodes codeword received not only in a burst mode, but also in a continuous mode. It can be used in a wide range of applications because of its versatility. The adaptive RS decoder over GF($2^8$) having the error-correcting capability of upto 10 has been designed in VHDL, and successfully synthesized in an FPGA chip.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.29-38
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• 2004

In this paper, we present an efficient architecture of a versatile Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder which can be programmed to decode RS codes continuously with my message length k as well as any block length n. This unique feature eliminates the need of inserting zeros for decoding shortened RS codes. Also, the values of the parameters n and k, hence the error-correcting capability t can be altered at every codeword block. The decoder permits 3-step pipelined processing based on the modified Euclid's algorithm (MEA). Since each step can be driven by a separate clock, the decoder can operate just as 2-step pipeline processing by employing the faster clock in step 2 and/or step 3. Also, the decoder can be used even in the case that the input clock is different from the output clock. Each step is designed to have a structure suitable for decoding RS codes with varying block length. A new architecture for the MEA is designed for variable values of the t. The operating length of the shift registers in the MEA block is shortened by one, and it can be varied according to the different values of the t. To maintain the throughput rate with less circuitry, the MEA block uses both the recursive technique and the over-clocking technique. The decoder can decodes codeword received not only in a burst mode, but also in a continuous mode. It can be used in a wide range of applications because of its versatility. The adaptive RS decoder over GF(2$^{8}$ ) having the error-correcting capability of upto 10 has been designed in VHDL, and successfully synthesized in an FPGA chip.