• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.8
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• pp.383-388
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• 2006

This Paper presents a novel approach to single channel microphone speech enhancement in noisy environments. Widely used noise reduction techniques based on the spectral subtraction are generally expressed as a spectral gam depending on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The well-known decision-directed(DD) estimator of Ephraim and Malah efficiently reduces musical noise under the background noise conditions, but generates the delay of the a prioiri SNR because the DD weights the speech spectrum component of the Previous frame in the speech signal. Therefore, the noise suppression gain which is affected by the delay of the a priori SNR, which is estimated by the DD matches the previous frame rather than the current one, so after noise suppression. this degrades the noise reduction performance during speech transient periods. We propose a computationally simple but effective speech enhancement technique based on the sigmoid type function for the weight Parameter of the DD. The proposed approach solves the delay problem about the main parameter, the a priori SNR of the DD while maintaining the benefits of the DD. Performances of the proposed enhancement algorithm are evaluated by ITU-T p.862 Perceptual Evaluation of Speech duality (PESQ). the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and the speech spectrogram under various noise environments and yields better results compared with the fixed weight parameter of the DD.

• Journal of Korean Academic Society of Home Health Care Nursing
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.41-69
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• 2005

Purpose: This study was performed to evaluate the outcomes of the home care nursing program conducted jointly by thirty two catholic churches and C hospital in Seoul. Method: The subjects included 173 patients who registered for the program during a 4 month-period from November 1, 2004 to February 28, 2005 and received home care services for more than 4 times and 32 professional nurses participating in the program. Using the concept of medical outcome study (MOS), the structure, process, outcome elements were analyzed. Result: 1) A Catholic homecare nursing center and nurses of the C hospital played a central role in providing nursing care, and each church operated its own vehicle from its own office. Home care nurse's job satisfaction was 2.8 out of total score of 4. The major illness was cerebrovascular disease including stroke followed by skeletomuscular disease including degenerative arthritis cancer, and diabetes. Among reasons for accessing the home care nursing program, hypertension management was most prevalent. More than half of the registration was done through catholic churches. Most people who referred the patient to the program was through the church. Most patients received home care nursing 1-2 times a week for 30 to 60 minutes in average and the most frequent type of service provided was basic nursing. 3) The most frequent reason for terminating home care services was death. The change in PPS(Palliative Performance Scale) level from the time of registration and after 4 visits was the same in 45%, decreased in 30%, and improved in 25%. Patient satisfaction was very high, showing 3.4 out of total score of 4. Conclusion: These results proved that the home care nursing program was highly appreciated by subjects and nurses were providing professional care. Thus the two parties involved in the program were actively supporting the program to fulfill their mission. However, several areas needed to be improved such as relating with local community, relating with family doctor, and issue of improving the working conditions for home care nurses.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.292-302
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• 2020

Machine learning algorithms have made immense contributions in various fields including sonar and radar applications. Recently developed Cycle-Consistency Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN), a variant of GAN has been successfully used for unpaired image-to-image translation. We present a modified CycleGAN for translation of underwater ship engine sounds with high perceptual quality. The proposed network is composed of an improved generator model trained to translate underwater audio from one vessel type to other, an improved discriminator to identify the data as real or fake and a modified cycle-consistency loss function. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the proposed CycleGAN are performed on publicly available underwater dataset ShipsEar by evaluating and comparing Mel-cepstral distortion, pitch contour matching, nearest neighbor comparison and mean opinion score with existing algorithms. The analysis results of the proposed network demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed network.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• autumn
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• pp.291-294
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• 2004

본 논문에서는 잡음의 변화(variance)가 없는 정적인 통계적 특성(Stationary Static Characteristic)을 갖는 환경에서 잡음 추정을 통해 지각 필터의 성능을 개선하는 알고리즘을 제안한다. 제안된 잡음 추정 알고리즘은 입력되는 잡음에 열화 된 신호의 묵음 구간에서 추정된 잡음을 이용하여 입력되는 잡음의 SNR을 추정 후, 대역 별로 smoothing 상수 값으로 잡음 에너지를 제어하여 첨가된 잡음을 추정함으로써 초기 추정 잡음 보다 가까운 추정 잡음을 얻을 수 있게 된다. 이는 신호를 열화 시킨 잡음을 보다 정확한 추정을 제공함으로써, 지각 필터의 응답을 개선할 수 있고 더불어 잡음에 의해 열화 된 신호의 음질을 개선할 수 있다. 또한 저 대역에 영향을 미치는 잡음인 경우 다른 방법들과는 달리 음질의 개선이 뚜렷하다. 기존의 방식과 비교를 위해 다양한 신호 대 잡음 비(signal-to-noise ratio, SNR)에서 열화 된 오디오 신호를 입력으로 사용하였다. 입력 SNR이 5dB, 10dB, 15dB와 20dB의 각각의 경우에 대하여 SSNR(Segmental SNR)과 잡음 대 마스킹 비(Noise-to-mask ratio, NMR), 음질 테스트를 수행한 결과, 청감 테스트(Mean Opinion Score, MOS Test) 결과의 향상과 음질개선의 개선을 확인할 수 있었다.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2003.11b
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• pp.1189-1192
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• 2003

초기 콜 센터는 단순히 고객에게 걸려오는 전화를 응대하는 서비스 수준으로 시작되었지만, 현재는 고객과 마주하는 최 접점으로 서비스 뿐만 아니라 마켓팅, 세일즈를 행하는 기업의 경쟁력을 유지하는데 있어 필수적인 요소로 자리잡아 가고 있다. 특히 개인고객을 많이 접하는 금융기관에서는 콜 센터를 대형화, 지방 분산화 및 백업체제 구축을 위한 Multi 센터를 구축하여 콜만 처리하는 센터로서가 아니라 다양한 채널[전화,email,fax,chating]를 통해 접속되는 고객요구 사항들을 통합된 인프라에서 One Stop 으로 처리하고자 한다. 하지만 회선 교환망을 이용하는 PBX기반 Voice 회선과 IP 환경의 DATA 를 처리하는 이원화된 구조로 Multi 콜 센터를 구축 할 경우, 타 센터의 상담원에게로 콜을 설정시 시간이 많이 소요되어 센터간 Call Load Balancing 및 상담원 Skill Based Routing 을 수행함이 어렵다는 단점이 있다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 단점을 개선할 수 있는 방안으로 Voice 와 Data 를 IP 기반 단일 망으로 구성하고 WAN상에서 음성을 전달할 때 적정한 MOS(Mean opinion score)를 측정 후 객관적으로 필요한 Bandwidth 를 검증하고 Muti 콜 센터에서 효과적인 콜 load Balancing 및 Routing을 할 수 있는 VOIP기반 Convereed Virtual Call Center Architecture 설계 한다.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.10
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• pp.3831-3851
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• 2015

This paper is concerned with the problem of joint resource allocation and user-pairing in virtual MIMO SC-FDMA systems to improve service quality of experience (QoE). No-reference logarithmic model is introduced to quantify service experience for each user and the objective is to maximize sum of all user's mean of score (MOS). We firstly formulate the optimal problem into an S-dimensional (S-D) assignment problem. Then, to solve this problem, the modified Lagrangian relaxation algorithm is deduced to obtain the suboptimal result of joint user-paring and subchannel allocation. The merits of this solution are as follows. First, the gap between its results and the global optimal one can be quantified and controlled by balancing the complexity and accuracy, which merit the other suboptimal algorithms do not have. Secondly, it has the polynomial computational complexity and the worst case complexity is O(3LN³), where L is the maximum iteration time and N is the number of subchannels. Simulations also prove that our proposed algorithm can effectively improve quality of experience and the gap between our proposed and the optimal algorithms can be controlled below 8%.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.2177-2193
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• 2018

This paper studies resource allocation schemes for the relay-aided cooperative system consisting of multiple source-destination pairs and decode-forward (DF) relays. Specially, relaying selection, multisubcarrier pairing and assignment, and power allocation are investigated jointly. We consider a combinatorial optimization problem on quality of experience (QoE) and energy consumption based on relay-aided cooperative system. For providing better QoE and lower energy consumption we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to maximize the total mean opinion score (MOS) value and minimize the total power consumption. To this end, we employ the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm version II (NSGA-II) and obtain sets of Pareto optimal solutions. Specially, two formulas are devised for the optimal solutions of the multi-objective optimization problems with and without a service priority constraint. Moreover, simulation results show that the proposed schemes are superior to the existing ones.

• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.6-11
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• 2013

Objectives There are only a limited number of studies on instruments assessing fatigue in university students, although fatigue exerts negative influences on their health and academic performances and fatigue-related complaints are more frequently reported in young adults than middle-aged adults. The aim of this study was to validate the 9-item Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS) among university students including both undergraduate and graduate students in South Korea. Methods A total of 176 university students completed a battery of self-report questionnaires, including the FSS, the Brief Fatigue Inventory (BFI), the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form 36 version 2 (MOS-SF36v2), and the Inclusion of Community in the Self Scale (ICS). The data were collected from February of 2012 to June of 2012. The reliability, convergent validity, divergent validity, and exploratory factor analyses were conducted to assess psychometric properties of the FSS. Results The mean FSS score was 3.20 (standard deviation = 1.43). The FSS demonstrated an excellent internal consistency (Cronbach's ${\alpha}$ = 0.93) and item-total correlations ranged from 0.56 to 0.90. Correlations of the FSS with the BFI (r = 0.71, p < 0.01), BDI-II (r = 0.54, p < 0.01), BAI (r = 0.46, p < 0.01), MOS-SF36v2 physical component summary (r = -0.28, p < 0.01), MOS-SF36v2 mental component summary (r = -0.55, p < 0.01), and ICS (Spearman's rho = -0.07, p = 0.33) showed acceptable convergent and divergent validity. Exploratory factor analysis defined one underlying factor (eigenvalue = 5.67) that explained 93.50% of the total variance. Conclusions To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate reliability and validity of the FSS in university students. The FSS exhibits good psychometric properties for evaluation of fatigue among university students in South Korea. Since the FSS is easy to administer, score, and interpret, it could be a useful tool in research and practice for assessing fatigue among university students.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.929-943
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• 2016

This paper proposes the rate control algorithm based on the S-JND (Saliency-Just Noticeable Difference) model for considering perceptual visual quality. The proposed rate control algorithm employs the S-JND model to simultaneously reflect human visual sensitivity and human visual attention for considering characteristics of human visual system. During allocating bits for CTU (Coding Tree Unit) level in a rate control, the bit allocation model calculates the S-JND threshold of each CTU in a picture. The threshold of each CTU is used for adaptively allocating a proper number of bits; thus, the proposed bit allocation model can improve perceptual visual quality. For performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm, the proposed algorithm was implemented on HM 16.9 and tested for sequences in Class B and Class C under the CTC (Common Test Condition) RA (Random Access), Low-delay B and Low-delay P case. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the bit-rate of 2.3%, and improves BD-PSNR of 0.07dB and bit-rate accuracy of 0.06% on average. We achieved MOS improvement of 0.03 with the proposed method, compared with the conventional method based on DSCQS (Double Stimulus Continuous Quality Scale).

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.11
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• pp.499-509
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• 2016

This study was undertaken to investigate the factors that influence post-traumatic growth in patients with breast cancer. The study subjects were 100 outpatients with breast cancer who visited the outpatient clinic of a university hospital. The instruments used for this study were Korean Post-traumatic Inventory (K-PTGI), Modified Medical Outcomes Study Social Support Survey (mMOS-SS), Self-Efficacy Scale for Self-Management of Breast Cancer (SESSM-B) and Cancer Coping Questionnaire (CCQ). The data were analyzed by t-test, ANOVA, Pearson-correlation coefficient, and stepwise multiple regression using SPSS/WIN 21.0. The mean score of post-traumatic growth was $3.4{\pm}0.9$ out of 5. Post traumatic growth had statistically significant correlation with social support, breast cancer self-management self-efficacy, and coping behavior. In stepwise multiple regression analysis, post-traumatic growth was significantly influenced by therapeutic compliance related self-efficacy and positive reframing coping behavior and it was account for 29% of the total variance. These results suggest that these influencing factors should be considered in developing the nursing intervention to improve the post-traumatic growth in patient with breast cancer.