• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.16-23
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• 2020

In High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) treatment, effective localization of HIFU focus is important for developing a safe treatment plan. While Magnetic Resonance Imaging guided HIFU (MRIgHIFU) can visualize the ultrasound path during the treatment for localizing HIFU focus, it is challenging in ultrasound imaging guided HIFU (USIgHIFU). In the present study, a real-time ultrasound beam visualization technique capable of localizing HIFU focus is presented for USIgHIFU. In the proposed method, a short pulse, with the same center frequency of an imaging ultrasound transducer below the regulated acoustic intensity (i.e., Ispta < 720 mW/㎠), was transmitted through a HIFU transducer whereupon backscattered signals were received by the imaging transducer. To visualize the HIFU beam path, the backscattered signals underwent dynamic receive focusing and subsequent echo processing. From in vitro experiments with bovine serum albumin gel phantoms, the HIFU beam path was clearly depicted with low acoustic intensity (i.e., Ispta of 94.8 mW/㎠) and the HIFU focus was successfully localized before any damages were produced. This result indicates that the proposed ultrasound beam path visualization method can be used for localizing the HIFU focus in real time while minimizing unwanted tissue damage in USIgHIFU treatment.

• Explosives and Blasting
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.1-16
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• 2010

This study focuses on the phenomenon that the blast damaged zone developed on rock slope surfaces can be affected by joint characteristics rather than by explosive power when the pre-splitting is applied to excavate a jointed rock slope. The characteristics of rock joints on a slope were investigated and categorized them into 4 cases. Also an image processing system has been used for comparing the distribution pattern of rock blocks. From this investigation, it was found that the rock blocks bigger than 2,000 mm occupied 42% in the case of single joint set and it showed the well efficiency of pre-splitting blast. In cases of 2~3 parallel joint sets and 2~3 intersecting joint sets are developed on rock surfaces, the rock blocks in the range of 1,000~2,000 mm occupied 43.6% and 35.8%, respectively, and it showed that the efficiency of pre-splitting was decreased. When more than 3 joint sets are randomly developed, however, the rock blocks in the range of 250~500 mm occupied 35% and there was no block bigger than 1,000 mm. This denotes that the blasting with pre-splitting was not effective. The numerical analysis using PFC2D showed that the blast damaged zone in a rock mass could be directly influenced by the pre-splitting. It is, therefore, required to investigate the discontinuity pattern on rock surfaces in advance, when the pre-splitting method is applied to excavate jointed rock slopes and to apply a flexible blating design with a consideration of the joint characteristics.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.187-194
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• 2012

Prostate cancer is one of the most frequent cancers in men and is a major cause of mortality in the most of countries. In many diagnostic and treatment procedures for prostate disease, transrectal ultrasound(TRUS) images are being used because the cost is low. But, accurate detection of prostate boundaries is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noises and the short range of gray levels. This paper proposes a method for automatic prostate segmentation in TRUS images using its average shape model and invariant features. This approach consists of 4 steps. First, it detects the probe position and the two straight lines connected to the probe using edge distribution. Next, it acquires 3 prostate patches which are in the middle of average model. The patches will be used to compare the features of prostate and nonprostate. Next, it compares and classifies which blocks are similar to 3 representative patches. Last, the boundaries from prior classification and the rough boundaries from first step are used to determine the segmentation. A number of experiments are conducted to validate this method and results showed that this new approach extracted the prostate boundary with less than 7.78% relative to boundary provided manually by experts.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.1289-1298
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• 2014

Pavement crack sealing method, which is one of the methods to maintain and repair the road, prevents the extending of cracks by repairing cracks in its early occurrence and has already been applied to many roadworks in advanced foreign country for a long time. But in the conventional crack sealing method, traffic accidents occur frequently during the repair because it's commonly performed on the heavy traffic road or highway. It also has some difficulties in securing the safety of workers from the risk of burns caused by heated sealant. In an effort to solve these problems, automated pavement crack sealing machines such as ARMM, OCCSM, TTLS have been developed in advanced foreign country since early 1990s. Also APCS in 2004 and ACSTM in 2013 were already developed domestically. However, since these automated crack sealers developed from a number of research institutions have different test-bed conditions and productivity measurement models, it's difficult to compare and evaluate them objectively. In this study, the image processing time of the respective machines and the movement time of each motion on the work process were estimated by using fully autonomous mapping and semi-automatic mapping in order to measure the productivity in the same environmental conditions. In addition, the productivity measurement test-bed reflected domestic road characteristics was designed to estimate and compare the productivity of the automated crack sealing machines.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.110-122
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• 2014

As multimedia technologies develop, three-dimensional (3D) technologies are attracting increasing attention from researchers. In particular, video quality assessment (VQA) has become a critical issue in stereoscopic image/video processing applications. Furthermore, a human visual system (HVS) could play an important role in the measurement of stereoscopic video quality, yet existing VQA methods have done little to develop a HVS for stereoscopic video. We seek to amend this by proposing a 3D visual attention (3DVA) model which simulates the HVS for stereoscopic video by combining multiple perceptual stimuli such as depth, motion, color, intensity, and orientation contrast. We utilize this 3DVA model for pooling on significant regions of very poor video quality, and we propose no-reference (NR) stereoscopic VQA (SVQA) method. We validated the proposed SVQA method using subjective test scores from our results and those reported by others. Our approach yields high correlation with the measured mean opinion score (MOS) as well as consistent performance in asymmetric coding conditions. Additionally, the 3DVA model is used to extract information for the region-of-interest (ROI). Subjective evaluations of the extracted ROI indicate that the 3DVA-based ROI extraction outperforms the other compared extraction methods using spatial or/and temporal terms.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.35-43
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• 2010

1D PCA utilized in the face appearance-based face recognition methods such as eigenface-based face recognition method may lead to less face representative power and more computational cost due to the resulting 1D face appearance data vector of high dimensionality. To resolve such problems of 1D PCA, 2D PCA-based face recognition methods had been developed. However, the face representation model obtained by direct application of 2D PCA to a face image set includes both face common features and face distinctive identity features. Face common features not only prevent face recognizability but also cause more computational cost. In this paper, we first develope a model of a face distinctive identity feature subspace separated from the effects of face common features in the face feature space obtained by application of 2D PCA analysis. Then, a novel robust face recognition based on the face distinctive identity feature subspace model is proposed. The proposed face recognition method based on the face distinctive identity feature subspace shows better performance than the conventional PCA-based methods (1D PCA-based one and 2D PCA-based one) with respect to recognition rate and processing time since it depends only on the face distinctive identity features. This is verified through various experiments using Yale A and IMM face database consisting of face images with various face poses under various illumination conditions.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.143-151
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• 2016

The aim of this study is to investigate the optimal algorithm to extract medical radiation induced pixel signal from complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors of smartphones camera. The pixel intensity and pixel number of smartphone camera were measured as the X-ray dose was increased. The front camera of the smartphone camera has low noise property and excellent dose response as compared to the back camera of the smartphone. The indirect method which uses scintillation crystal in front of the smartphone camera, couldn't improve the X-ray detection efficiency as compared to the direct method which does not use any scintillator in front of the smartphone camera. When we used the algorithm which employing threshold level on the pixel intensity and pixel number, the dose linearity was more higher for the pixel intensity rather for the pixel number. The use of pixel intensity of Y color component which represents the grey scale, would be efficient in terms of the radiation detection efficiency and reducing the complexity of the image processing. We expect that the radiation dose monitoring can be managed effectively and systematically by using the proposed radiation detection algorithm, thus eventually will contribute to the public healthcare.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.231-241
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• 2014

Recently, single channel seismic survey for engineering purpose have been used widely taking advantage of simple processing. However it is very difficult to obtain high fidelity subsurface image by single channel seismic due to insufficient fold coverage. Recently, seismic waveform inversion in multi channel seismic survey is utilized for accurate subsurface imaging even in complex terrains. In this paper, we propose the seismic waveform inversion algorithm for velocity model building using a single channel seismic data. We utilize the Gauss-Newton method and assume that subsurface model is 1-Dimensional. Seismic source estimation technique is used and offset effect is also corrected by removing delay time by offset. Proposed algorithm is verified by applying modified Marmousi2 model, and applied to field data set obtained in port of Busan.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.5 s.305
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• pp.95-102
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• 2005

When images compressed with block-based compression techniques are transmitted over a noisy channel, unexpected block losses occur. In this paper, we present a post-processing-based block recovery scheme using Haar wavelet features. No consideration of the edge-direction, when recover the lost blocks, can cause block-blurring effects. The proposed directional recovery method in this paper is effective for the strong edge because exploit the varying neighboring blocks adaptively according to the edges and the directional information in the image. First, the adaptive selection of neighbor blocks is performed based on the energy of wavelet subbands (EWS) and difference of DC values (DDC). The lost blocks are recovered by the linear interpolation in the spatial domain using selected blocks. The method using only EWS performs well for horizontal and vertical edges, but not as well for diagonal edges. Conversely, only using DDC performs well diagonal edges with the exception of line- or roof-type edge profiles. Therefore, we combined EWS and DDC for better results. The proposed methods out performed the previous methods using fixed blocks.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.5
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• pp.83-93
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• 2013

Recently, the SURF algorithm, which is conjugated for object tracking system as part of many computer vision applications, is a well-known scale- and rotation-invariant feature detection algorithm. The SURF, due to its high computational complexity, there is essential to develop a hardware accelerator in order to be used on an IP in embedded environment. However, the SURF requires a huge local memory, causing many problems that increase the chip size and decrease the value of IP in ASIC and SoC system design. In this paper, we proposed a way to design a SURF algorithm in hardware with greatly reduced local memory by partitioning the algorithms into several Sub-IPs using external memory and a DMA. To justify validity of the proposed method, we developed an example of simplified object tracking algorithm. The execution speed of the hardware IP was about 31 frame/sec, the logic size was about 74Kgate in the 30nm technology with 81Kbytes local memory in the embedded system platform consisting of ARM Cortex-M0 processor, AMBA bus(AHB-lite and APB), DMA and a SDRAM controller. Hence, it can be used to the hardware IP of SoC Chip. If the image processing algorithm akin to SURF is applied to the method proposed in this paper, it is expected that it can implement an efficient hardware design for target application.