• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.198-206
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• 2011

Hearing devices like cochlear implant, vibrant soundbridge, etc. try to offer better sound for people. In hearing devices, several beamformers including conventional directional microphone are applicable to noise reduction. Each beamformer has different directional response and it could change sound intelligibility or quality for listeners. Therefore, we investigated the performance of three beamformers, which are first and second order directional microphone, and broadband beamformer(BBF) with a computer simulation assuming hearing device microphone configuration. We also calculated objective measurements which have been used to evaluate speech enhancement algorithms. In the simulation, a single speech and a single babble noisewere propagated from the front and $135^{\circ}$ azimuth degrees respectively. Microphones were configured in an end-fire array and the spacing was varied in comparison. With 3 cm spacing, BBF had about 3 dB higher enhanced SNR than that of directional microphones. However, enhancement of segmental SNR and frequency weighted segmental SNR were similar between the first order directional microphone and broadband beamformer. In addition when steady state noise was used, broadband beamformer showed the increased performance and had the highest enhanced SNR, and segmental SNR.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.227-234
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• 2020

In this paper, we propose wav-U-Net to improve speech enhancement in heavy noisy environments, and it has implemented three principal techniques. First, as input data, we use 128 modified Mel-scale filter banks which can reduce computational burden instead of 512 frequency bins. Mel-scale aims to mimic the non-linear human ear perception of sound by being more discriminative at lower frequencies and less discriminative at higher frequencies. Therefore, Mel-scale is the suitable feature considering both performance and computing power because our proposed network focuses on speech signals. Second, we add a simple ResNet as pre-processing that helps our proposed network make estimated speech signals clear and suppress high-frequency noises. Finally, the proposed U-Net model shows significant performance regardless of the kinds of noise. Especially, despite using a single channel, we confirmed that it can well deal with non-stationary noises whose frequency properties are dynamically changed, and it is possible to estimate speech signals from noisy speech signals even in extremely noisy environments where noises are much lauder than speech (less than SNR 0dB). The performance on our proposed wav-U-Net was improved by about 200% on SDR and 460% on NSDR compared to the conventional Jansson's wav-U-Net. Also, it was confirmed that the processing time of out wav-U-Net with 128 modified Mel-scale filter banks was about 2.7 times faster than the common wav-U-Net with 512 frequency bins as input values.

• Korean Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.187-196
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• 2016

This study was performed to improve the foaming generated in the effluent of wastewater treatment plant from March 2015 to July 2016. The main cause of foaming was air entrainment by an impinging jet and the internal accumulation by the diffusion barrier. Particularly, the foam growth was most active when there is low tide and larger discharge. To solve this problem, we experimented after installing fine mesh screen and the artificial channel device with underwater discharging outlet in the treated wastewater discharge channel and the outlet, respectively. As a result, the effects of foam reduction by devices ranged 85.0~92.0% and 70.7~85.6%, respectively. In addition, the foam and the noise were easily solved, first of all look to contribute to the prevention of complaints. Our device studies were applied to a single wastewater treatment plant. However, it is considered to be able to apply in other similar cases of domestic sewage treatment plants.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.1993-2001
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• 2006

The piezoelectric bimorph film, which, as an actuator, can generate more effective displacement than the usual PVDF film, is used to control the turbulent boundary-layer flow. The change of wall pressures inside the turbulent boundary layer is observed by using the multi-channel microphone array flush-mounted on the surface when actuation at the non-dimensional frequency $f_b^+$:=0.008 and 0.028 is applied to the turbulent boundary layer. The wall pressure characteristics by the actuation to produce local displacement are more dominantly influenced by the size of the actuator module than the actuation frequency. The movement of large-scale turbulent structures to the upper layer is found to be the main mechanism of the reduction in the wall- pressure energy spectrum when the 700$700{\nu}/u_{\tau}$-long bimorph film is periodically actuated at the non- dimensional frequency $f_b^+$:=0.008 and 0.028. The biomorph actuator is triggered with the time delay for the active forcing at a single frequency when a 1/8' pressure-type, pin-holed microphone sensor detects the large-amplitude pressure event by the turbulent spot. The wall-pressure energy in the late-transitional boundary layer is partially reduced near the convection wavenumber by the open-loop control based on the large amplitude event.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.12C
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• pp.1133-1143
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose an enhanced two-step search scheme for rapid and reliable signal acquisition in UWB systems under multipath channels. The proposed TSS-LS (Two-Step Search scheme with the Linear search based Second step) achieves rapid acquisition performance comparable to the conventional TSS-BS (Two-Step Search scheme with the Bit reversal search based Second step) already proposed by the authors, based on the single-dwell search with two-step thresholds and search windows. However, unlike the TSS-BS which employs the bit reversal search in the second step, the proposed TSS-LS utilizes the linear search in the second step to improve the reliability of signal acquisition. Simulation results with multipath channel models by IEEE 802.15.3a show that the two-step search schemes for the UWB signal acquisition can achieve sig nificant reduction of the required mean acquisition time as compared to general search schemes. In addition, we observe that the proposed TSS-LS achieves quite good bit error rate performance for large signal-to-noise ratios, which is favorably comparable to the case of ideal perfect timing.