• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.8-18
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• 2012

Urban nature plays an important role not only in the improvement of the physical environment but also from the perspective of psychological and social function. In particular, schoolyards as well as the green spaces near school surroundings function as a primary space for urban children to experience nature in Korea, as they spend most of their time at school. In this study, the status of urban green spaces near school surroundings was examined. For the analysis, 185 elementary schools in Seoul were selected and the green spaces within a radius of 300m(defined as 'school zone' in this study) were analyzed using the Rapid Eye multispectral satellite image data. The mean green space ratio of school zone accounts to about 21% with a high variation from 74% to 0.7% and more than half of the school zone have a green space ratio of less than 20%. Schools with a high green space ratio in their school zone are mostly located near urban forests, so forest areas particularly contribute to increase the green space ratio. Furthermore, forest vegetation shows relatively higher vitality than other green spaces located in urbanized areas. In contrast, schools with a low green space ratio in their school zone are mostly situated in high-density residential areas and the green spaces show relatively low vegetation vitality. Except for the urban forest, the majority of urban green spaces in urbanized areas are landscape green facilities in apartment districts. The other types of urban open spaces such as environmentally shaped schoolyards or street parks account only for a very small proportion of school surroundings. Therefore, it is needed to establish countermeasures in the context of urban planning; e.g. to promote the school forest projects preferentially by selecting schools with a extremely low green space ratio in their school zone, to foster roof greening in near surroundings, and to connect schoolyards organically with nearby apartment landscape green facilities as an easily accessible urban open space.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.53-69
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• 2011

Vision and voice-based technologies are commonly utilized for human-robot interaction. But it is widely recognized that the performance of vision and voice-based interaction systems is deteriorated by a large margin in the real-world situations due to environmental and user variances. Human users need to be very cooperative to get reasonable performance, which significantly limits the usability of the vision and voice-based human-robot interaction technologies. As a result, touch screens are still the major medium of human-robot interaction for the real-world applications. To empower the usability of robots for various services, alternative interaction technologies should be developed to complement the problems of vision and voice-based technologies. In this paper, we propose the use of accelerometer-based gesture interface as one of the alternative technologies, because accelerometers are effective in detecting the movements of human body, while their performance is not limited by environmental contexts such as lighting conditions or camera's field-of-view. Moreover, accelerometers are widely available nowadays in many mobile devices. We tackle the problem of classifying acceleration signal patterns of 26 English alphabets, which is one of the essential repertoires for the realization of education services based on robots. Recognizing 26 English handwriting patterns based on accelerometers is a very difficult task to take over because of its large scale of pattern classes and the complexity of each pattern. The most difficult problem that has been undertaken which is similar to our problem was recognizing acceleration signal patterns of 10 handwritten digits. Most previous studies dealt with pattern sets of 8~10 simple and easily distinguishable gestures that are useful for controlling home appliances, computer applications, robots etc. Good features are essential for the success of pattern recognition. To promote the discriminative power upon complex English alphabet patterns, we extracted 'motion trajectories' out of input acceleration signal and used them as the main feature. Investigative experiments showed that classifiers based on trajectory performed 3%~5% better than those with raw features e.g. acceleration signal itself or statistical figures. To minimize the distortion of trajectories, we applied a simple but effective set of smoothing filters and band-pass filters. It is well known that acceleration patterns for the same gesture is very different among different performers. To tackle the problem, online incremental learning is applied for our system to make it adaptive to the users' distinctive motion properties. Our system is based on instance-based learning (IBL) where each training sample is memorized as a reference pattern. Brute-force incremental learning in IBL continuously accumulates reference patterns, which is a problem because it not only slows down the classification but also downgrades the recall performance. Regarding the latter phenomenon, we observed a tendency that as the number of reference patterns grows, some reference patterns contribute more to the false positive classification. Thus, we devised an algorithm for optimizing the reference pattern set based on the positive and negative contribution of each reference pattern. The algorithm is performed periodically to remove reference patterns that have a very low positive contribution or a high negative contribution. Experiments were performed on 6500 gesture patterns collected from 50 adults of 30~50 years old. Each alphabet was performed 5 times per participant using $Nintendo{(R)}$ $Wii^{TM}$ remote. Acceleration signal was sampled in 100hz on 3 axes. Mean recall rate for all the alphabets was 95.48%. Some alphabets recorded very low recall rate and exhibited very high pairwise confusion rate. Major confusion pairs are D(88%) and P(74%), I(81%) and U(75%), N(88%) and W(100%). Though W was recalled perfectly, it contributed much to the false positive classification of N. By comparison with major previous results from VTT (96% for 8 control gestures), CMU (97% for 10 control gestures) and Samsung Electronics(97% for 10 digits and a control gesture), we could find that the performance of our system is superior regarding the number of pattern classes and the complexity of patterns. Using our gesture interaction system, we conducted 2 case studies of robot-based edutainment services. The services were implemented on various robot platforms and mobile devices including $iPhone^{TM}$. The participating children exhibited improved concentration and active reaction on the service with our gesture interface. To prove the effectiveness of our gesture interface, a test was taken by the children after experiencing an English teaching service. The test result showed that those who played with the gesture interface-based robot content marked 10% better score than those with conventional teaching. We conclude that the accelerometer-based gesture interface is a promising technology for flourishing real-world robot-based services and content by complementing the limits of today's conventional interfaces e.g. touch screen, vision and voice.

• The Korean Journal of Air & Space Law and Policy
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.3-54
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• 2013

Nowadays, major advanced countries in aviation technology are putting their effort to develop commercial and civil Unmanned Aircraft System(UAS) due to its highly promising market demand in the future. The market scale of commercial and civil UAS is expected to increase up to approximately 8.8 billon U.S. dollars by the year 2020. The usage of commercial and civil UAS covers various areas such as remote sensing, relaying communications, pollution monitoring, fire detection, aerial reconnaissance and photography, coastline monitoring, traffic monitoring and control, disaster control, search and rescue, etc. With the introduction of UAS, changes need to be made on current Air Traffic Management Systems which are focused mainly manned aircrafts to support the operation of UAS. Accordingly, the legislation for the UAS operation should be followed. Currently, ICAO's Unmanned Aircraft System Study Group(UASSG) is leading the standardization process of legislation for UAS operation internationally. However, some advanced countries such as United States, United Kingdom, Australia have adopted its own legislation. Among these countries, United States is most forth going with President Obama signing a bill to integrate UAS into U.S. national airspace by 2015. In case of Korea, legislation for the unmanned aircraft system is just in the beginning stage. There are no regulations regarding the operation of unmanned aircraft in Korea's domestic aviation law except some clauses regarding definition and permission of the unmanned aircraft flight. However, the unmanned aircrafts are currently being used in military and under development for commercial use. In addition, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport has a ambitious plan to develop commercial and civil UAS as Korea's most competitive area in aircraft production and export. Thus, Korea is in need of the legislation for the UAS operation domestically. In this regards, I personally think that Korea's domestic legislation for UAS operation will be enacted focusing on following 12 areas : (1)use of airspace, (2)licenses of personnel, (3)certification of airworthiness, (4)definition, (5)classification, (6)equipments and documents, (7)communication, (8)rules of air, (9)training, (10)security, (11)insurance, (12)others. Im parallel with enacting domestic legislation, korea should contribute to the development of international standards for UAS operation by actively participating ICAO's UASSG.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.88 no.3
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• pp.352-363
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• 1999

It has been rare to obtain reliable information related to the size of forest land in North Korea. Several sources of forest statistics, ranging from the first map of forest distribution in Korean Peninsula produced in 1910 to official data reported by the North Korea Government in 1997, were gathered and analyzed to define the characteristics of forest cover changes over years. In addition, Landsat satellite data obtained from 1973 to 1993 were processed for the two study areas of the provinces of Pyungyang and Heasan, where the topography and land use pattern are significantly different each other. Using three sets of multitemporal Landsat imagery, land cover ma-ps were produced by computer classification. Although forest statistics reported before 1990 are somewhat inconsistent, they mere gradually decreasing over years. The estimates of 1991 satellite data and the recent statistics reported in 1998 shows very steep decline in forest lands as compared to the ones before 1990. The abrupt decrease of forest lands after 1990 was also found on the detailed analysis of Landsat data for the two study areas of Pyungyang and Heasan. The rapid decline of forest lands may have something to do with the poor economic situation of the country and the continuing natural disasters of severe flooding and drought. Unstocked forest, which was not classified into forest land, was a very distinct and pervasive land cover type that can be easily observed on satellite imagery. Since unstocked forest land in North Korea may be a critical factor for degrading environmental quality as well as for the continuing natural disasters, further analysis is necessary to define the exact extent and the physical characteristics of the cover type.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.43 no.6
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• pp.968-974
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• 2010

We assessed the feasibility of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) applied for the spectral processing to enhance the estimation performance quality of soil organic matters using visible-near infrared spectra and mapped their distribution via block Kriging model. Continuum-removal and $1^{st}$ derivative transform as well as Haar and Daubechies DWT were used to enhance spectral variation in terms of soil organic matter contents and those spectra were put into the PLSR (Partial Least Squares Regression) model. Estimation results using raw reflectance and transformed spectra showed similar quality with $R^2$ > 0.6 and RPD> 1.5. These values mean the approximation prediction on soil organic matter contents. The poor performance of estimation using DWT spectra might be caused by coarser approximation of DWT which not enough to express spectral variation based on soil organic matter contents. The distribution maps of soil organic matter were drawn via a spatial information model, Kriging. Organic contents of soil samples made Gaussian distribution centered at around 20 g $kg^{-1}$ and the values in the map were distributed with similar patterns. The estimated organic matter contents had similar distribution to the measured values even though some parts of estimated value map showed slightly higher. If the estimation quality is improved more, estimation model and mapping using spectroscopy may be applied in global soil mapping, soil classification, and remote sensing data analysis as a rapid and cost-effective method.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.43 no.5
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• pp.591-603
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• 2022

The color and optical properties of seawater are determined by the interaction between dissolved organic and inorganic substances and plankton contained in it. The Ieodo - Ocean Research Institute (I-ORS), located in the East China Sea, is affected by the low salinity of the Yangtze River in the west and the Tsushima Warm Current in the south. Thus, it is a suitable site for analyzing the fluctuations in circulation and optical properties around the Korean Peninsula. In this study, seawater surrounding the I-ORS was classified according to its optical characteristics using the satellite remote reflectance observed with Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)/Aqua and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) bio-Optical Marine Algorithm Dataset (NOMAD) from January 2016 to December 2020. Additionally, the variation characteristics of optical water types (OWTs) from different seasons were presented. A total of 59,532 satellite match-up data (d ≤ 10 km) collected from seawater surrounding the I-ORS were classified into 23 types using the spectral angle mapper. The OWTs appearing in relatively clear waters surrounding the I-ORS were observed to be greater than 50% of the total. The maximum OWTs frequency in summer and winter was opposite according to season. In particular, the OWTs corresponding to optically clear seawater were primarily present in the summer. However, the same OWTs were lower than overall 1% rate in winter. Considering the OWTs fluctuations in the East China Sea, the I-ORS is inferred to be located in the transition zone of seawater. This study contributes in understanding the optical characteristics of seawater and improving the accuracy of satellite ocean color variables.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.258-266
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• 2023

This study analyzed methodologies for estimating carbon stocks of perennial woody crops and the research cases in overseas countries. As a result, we found that Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, and Japan are using the stock-difference method, while Austria, Denmark, and Germany are estimating the change in the carbon stock based on the gain-loss method. In some overseas countries, the researches were conducted on estimating the carbon stock change using image data as tier 3 phase beyond the research developing country-specific factors as tier 2 phase. In South Korea, convergence studies as the third stage were conducted in forestry field, but advanced research in the agricultural field is at the beginning stage. Based on these results, we suggest directions for the following four future researches: 1) securing national-specific factors related to emissions and removals in the agricultural field through the development of allometric equation and carbon conversion factors for perennial woody crops to improve the completeness of emission and removals statistics, 2) implementing policy studies on the cultivation area calculation refinement with fruit tree-biomass-based maturity, 3) developing a more advanced estimation technique for perennial woody crops in the agricultural sector using allometric equation and remote sensing techniques based on the agricultural and forestry satellite scheduled to be launched in 2025, and to establish a matrix and monitoring system for perennial woody crop cultivation areas in the agricultural sector, Lastly, 4) estimating soil carbon stocks change, which is currently estimated by treating all agricultural areas as one, by sub-land classification to implement a dynamic carbon cycle model. This study suggests a detailed guideline and advanced methods of carbon stock change calculation for perennial woody crops, which supports 2050 Carbon Neutral Strategy of Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs and activate related research in agricultural sector.