• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.422-428
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• 2023

Ultrafast ultrasound imaging has been applied to various imaging approaches, including shear wave elastography, ultrafast Doppler, and super-resolution imaging. However, these methods are still challenging in real-time implementation for three Dimension (3D) or portable applications because of their massive data rate required. In this paper, we proposed an adaptive quantization method that effectively reduces the data rate of large Radio Frequency (RF) data. In soft tissue, ultrasound backscatter signals require a high dynamic range, and thus typical quantization used in the current systems uses the quantization level of 10 bits to 14 bits. To alleviate the quantization level to expand the application of ultrafast ultrasound imaging, this study proposed a depth-sectional quantization approach that reduces the quantization errors. For quantitative evaluation, Field II simulations, phantom experiments, and in vivo imaging were conducted and CNR, spatial resolution, and SSIM values were compared with the proposed method and fixed quantization method. We demonstrated that our proposed method is capable of effectively reducing the quantization level down to 3-bit while minimizing the image quality degradation.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.521-535
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• 2022

Efficient management of deteriorating civil infrastructure is one of the most important research topics in many developed countries. In particular, the remote displacement measurement of bridges using linear variable differential transformers, global positioning systems, laser Doppler vibrometers, and computer vision technologies has been attempted extensively. This paper proposes a remote displacement measurement system using closed-circuit televisions (CCTVs) and a computer-vision-based method for in-situ bridge bearings having relatively large displacement due to temperature change in long term. The hardware of the system is composed of a reference target for displacement measurement, a CCTV to capture target images, a gateway to transmit images via a mobile network, and a central server to store and process transmitted images. The usage of CCTV capable of night vision capture and wireless data communication enable long-term 24-hour monitoring on wide range of bridge area. The computer vision algorithm to estimate displacement from the images involves image preprocessing for enhancing the circular features of the target, circular Hough transformation for detecting circles on the target in the whole field-of-view (FOV), and homography transformation for converting the movement of the target in the images into an actual expansion displacement. The simple target design and robust circle detection algorithm help to measure displacement using target images where the targets are far apart from each other. The proposed system is installed at the Tancheon Overpass located in Seoul, and field experiments are performed to evaluate the accuracy of circle detection and displacement measurements. The circle detection accuracy is evaluated using 28,542 images captured from 71 CCTVs installed at the testbed, and only 48 images (0.168%) fail to detect the circles on the target because of subpar imaging conditions. The accuracy of displacement measurement is evaluated using images captured for 17 days from three CCTVs; the average and root-mean-square errors are 0.10 and 0.131 mm, respectively, compared with a similar displacement measurement. The long-term operation of the system, as evaluated using 8-month data, shows high accuracy and stability of the proposed system.