• The Korean Journal of Pain
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.219-228
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• 2014

Background: A lipo-prostaglandin E1 agonist is effective for the treatment of neurological symptoms of spinal stenosis when administered by an oral or intravenous route. we would like to reveal the therapeutic effect of an epidural injection of lipo-prostaglandin E1 on hyperalgesia in foraminal stenosis. Methods: A total of 40 male Sprague-Dawley rats were included. A small stainless steel rod was inserted into the L5/L6 intervertebral foramen to produce intervertebral foraminal stenosis and chronic compression of the dorsal root ganglia (DRG). The rats were divided into three groups: epidural PGE1 (EP) (n = 15), saline (n = 15), and control (n = 10). In the EP group, $0.15{\mu}g{\cdot}kg-1$ of a lipo-PGE1 agonist was injected daily via an epidural catheter for 10 days from postoperative day 3. In the saline group, saline was injected. Behavioral tests for mechanical hyperalgesia were performed for 3 weeks. Then, the target DRG was analyzed for the degree of chromatolysis, chronic inflammation, and fibrosis in light microscopic images. Results: From the fifth day after lipo-PGE1 agonist injection, the EP group showed significant recovery from mechanical hyperalgesia, which was maintained for 3 weeks (P < 0.05). Microscopic analysis showed much less chromatolysis in the EP group than in the saline or control groups. Conclusions: An epidurally administered lipo-PGE1 agonist relieved neuropathic pain, such as mechanical hyperalgesia, in a rat foraminal stenosis model, with decreasing chromatolysis in target DRG. We suggest that epidurally administered lipo-PGE1 may be a useful therapeutic candidate for patients with spinal stenosis.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.75-81
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• 2012

Road identification is the important task for extracting a road region from the high-resolution satellite images, when the road candidates is extracted by the pre-processing tasks using a binarization, noise removal, and color processing. Therefore, we propose a noble approach for identifying a road using the orientation-selective spatial filters, which is motivated by a computational model of neuron cells found in the primary visual cortex. In our approach, after the neuron cell typed spatial filters is applied to the isolated connected-labeling road candidate regions, proposed method identifies the region of perceiving the strong orientation feature with the real road region. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the accuracy&error ratio in the confusion matrix was measured from road candidates including road and non-road class. As a result, the proposed method shows the more than 92% accuracy.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.94-102
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• 2012

Recently entered into an aging socity as the number of elderly drivers is increasing. Traffic accidents of elderly drivers are caused by driver inattentions such as poor vehicle control due to aging, visual information retrieval problems caused by presbyopia, and objects identifying problems caused by low contrast sensitivity. In this paper, detection method of ROIs on the road is proposed. The proposed method creates the saliency map to detect the candidate ROIs from the input image. And, the input image is segmented to obtain the ROIs boundary. Finally, selective visual attention regions are detected according to the presence or absence of a segmented region with saliency pixels. Experimental results from a variety of outdoor environmental conditions, the proposed method presented a fast object detection and a high detection rate.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.38-43
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• 2012

It is necessary to measure cracks on concrete slab surface accurately in concrete structure maintenance for the stability of the structure. However, in real world, the process is done by time consuming and ineffective manual inspection. Although there have been some studies to provide computerized inspection methods, they are vulnerable to rugged surface or noise due to the influence of the light or environmental reasons. In this paper, we propose a new method that extracts not only undistorted cracks but minute cracks that were often regarded as noise. We extract candidate crack areas by applying fuzzy method with R, G, and B channel values of concrete slab structure. Then further refinement processes are performed with SOM algorithm and density based cutoff to remove noise. Experiment verifies that the proposed method is sufficiently useful in various crack images.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.55-61
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• 2008

A real-time three-dimensional vision is a passive system, which would support various applications including collision avoidance, home networks. It is a good alternative of active systems, which are subject to interference in noisy environments. In this paper, we designed a SAD correlator with respect to resource usage for a real-time three-dimensional vision system. Regular structures, linear data flow and abundant parallelism make the correlation algorithm a good candidate for a reconfigurable hardware. We implemented two versions of SAD correlator in HDL and synthesized them to determine resource requirements and performance. From the experiment we show that the SAD correlator fits into reconfigurable hardware in marginal cost and can handle about 30 frames/sec with $640{\times}480$ images.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.10 no.4 s.36
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• pp.203-211
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a new automatic fingerprint identification system that identifies individuals in large databases. The algorithm consists of three steps; preprocessing, classification, and matching, in the classification. we present a new classification technique based on the statistical approach for directional image distribution. In matching, we also describe improved minutiae candidate pair extraction algorithm that is faster and more accurate than existing algorithm. In matching stage, we extract fingerprint minutiaes from its thinned image for accuracy, and introduce matching process using minutiae linking information. Introduction of linking information into the minutiae matching process is a simple but accurate way, which solves the problem of reference minutiae pair selection in comparison stage of two fingerprints quickly. This algorithm is invariant to translation and rotation of fingerprint. The proposed system was tested on 1000 fingerprint images from the semiconductor chip style scanner. Experimental results reveal false acceptance rate is decreased and genuine acceptance rate is increased than existing method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.38-43
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• 2008

Skin color information is an important feature for face region detection in color images. This can detect face region using statistical skin color model who is created from skin color information. However, due to the including of different race of people's skin color points, this general statistical model is not accurate enough to detect each specific image as we expected. This paper proposes method to detect correctly face region in various color image that other complexion part is included. In this method set face candidate region applying complexion Gausian distribution based on YCbCr skin color model and applied mathematical morphology to remove noise part and part except face region in color image. And achieved correct face region detection because using Haar-like feature. This approach is capable to distinguish face region from extremely similar skin colors, such as neck skin color or am skin color. Experimental results show that our method can effectively improve face detection results.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.167-173
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• 2012

Inter-granular Bright Points (igBPs) are small-scale objects in the Solar photosphere which can be seen within dark inter-granular lanes. We present a new algorithm to automatically detect and extract igBPs. Laplacian and Morphological Dilation (LMD) technique is employed by the algorithm. It involves three basic processing steps: (1) obtaining candidate "seed" regions by Laplacian; (2) determining the boundary and size of igBPs by morphological dilation; (3) discarding brighter granules by a probability criterion. For validating our algorithm, we used the observed samples of the Dutch Open Telescope (DOT), collected on April 12, 2007. They contain 180 high-resolution images, and each has a $85{\times}68\;arcsec^2$ field of view (FOV). Two important results are obtained: first, the identified rate of igBPs reaches 95% and is higher than previous results; second, the diameter distribution is $220{\pm}25km$, which is fully consistent with previously published data. We conclude that the presented algorithm can detect and extract igBPs automatically and effectively.

• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.405-407
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• 2015

We describe a survey of quasars in the early universe, beyond z ~ 5, which is one of the main science goals of the Infrared Medium-deep Survey (IMS) conducted by the Center for the Exploration of the Origin of the Universe (CEOU). We use multi-wavelength archival data from SDSS, CFHTLS, UKIDSS, WISE, and SWIRE, which provide deep images over wide areas suitable for searching for high redshift quasars. In addition, we carried out a J-band imaging survey at the United Kingdom InfraRed Telescope with a depth of ~23 AB mag and survey area of ${\sim}120deg^2$, which makes IMS a suitable survey for finding faint, high redshift quasars at z ~ 7. In addition, for the quasar candidates at z ~ 5.5, we are conducting observations with the Camera for QUasars in EArly uNiverse (CQUEAN) on the 2.1m telescope at McDonald Observatory, which has a custom-designed filter set installed to enhance the efficiency of selecting robust quasar candidate samples in this redshift range. We used various color-color diagrams suitable for the specific redshift ranges, which can reduce contaminating sources such as M/L/T dwarfs, low redshift galaxies, and instrumental defects. The high redshift quasars we are confirming can provide us with clues to the growth of supermassive black holes since z ~ 7. By expanding the quasar sample at 5 < z < 7, the final stage of the hydrogen reionization in the intergalactic medium (IGM) can also be fully understood. Moreover, we can make useful constraints on the quasar luminosity function to study the contribution of quasars to the IGM reionization.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.199-207
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• 2017

This study would analyze the visual expression elements, including layout, color, picture and typography in the election posters with the five main candidates of the 19th Presidential Election as the targets of the analysis. This study analyzed the candidates' images in the election posters and conducted a survey of the visual expression elements survey by the age of the voters. As a result of the analysis, Presidential Candidate Moon Jae-in felt fresh, and Yoo Seung-min like Moon had high percentages in layout and color, highlighting his clean image. Hong Jun-pyo had the most diverse preferences by age, and Ahn Cheol-soo, who showed the most unprecedented poster, too, had diverse preferences by age. Shim Sang-jung, who emphasized her familiar image, had preferences for her visual expression elements by all age groups in the following order: layout, color, picture and typography. Therefore, in order to utilize the visual expressions of the election posters, effectively, it is necessary to clarify the messages that the candidates would claim. For this purpose, objective research should continue so that they can be further developed artistically and academically through broad understanding and analysis of the voters rather than subjective expressions.