• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.29-33
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• 2010

Among several critical topics in semiconductor fabrication technology, particles in addition to bonded surface contaminations are issues of great concerns. This study reports the development of a system which inspects wafer bond integrity by analyzing laser beam transmittance deviations and the variations of the intensity caused by the defect thickness. Since the speckling phenomenon exists inherently as long as the laser is used as an optical source and it degrades the inspection accuracy, speckle contrast is another obstacle to be conquered in this system. Consequently speckle contrast reduction methods were reviewed and among the all remedies have been established in the past 30 years the most adaptable solution for inline inspection system is applied. Simulation and subsequently design of experiments has been utilized to discover the best solution to improve irradiance distribution and detection accuracy. Comparison between simulation and experimental results has been done and it confirms an outstanding detection accuracy achievement. Bonded wafer inspection system has been developed and it is ready to be implemented in FAB in the near future.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.122-131
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• 2008

For B-mode ultrasound images, we propose an image enhancement algorithm based on a multi-resolution approach, which consists of edge enhancing and noise reducing procedures. Edge enhancement processing is applied sequentially to coarse-to-fine resolution images obtained from wavelet-transformed data. In each resolution, the structural features of each pixel are examined through eigen analysis. Then, if a pixel belongs to an edge region, we perform two-step filtering: that is, directional smoothing is conducted along the tangential direction of the edge to improve continuity and directional sharpening is conducted along the normal direction to enhance the contrast. In addition, speckle noise is alleviated by proper attenuation of the wavelet coefficients of the homogeneous regions at each band. This region-based speckle-reduction scheme is differentiated from other methods that are based on the magnitude statistics of the wavelet coefficients. The proposed algorithm enhances edges regardless of changes in the resolution of an image, and the algorithm efficiently reduces speckle noise without affecting the sharpness of the edge. Hence, compared with existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm considerably improves the subjective image quality without providing any noticeable artifacts.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.126-130
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• 2008

We propose and experimentally demonstrate an effective method to reduce near-field speckle noise at the output of a 50 ${\mu}m$ graded index multimode fiber using a short cylindrical piezoelectric transducer(PZT) vibrating in the radial direction. The fiber was coiled as tightly as possible around the mandrel of the PZT and a periodic stretching effect was caused by the radial oscillations of the actuator. The output of the optical fiber using the He-Ne laser source was intensively observed by a CCD camera. By counting all the pixels corresponding to relative intensity graded into 256 levels in the selected area and by calculating standard deviation and mean value of the intensity, we could measure the speckle contrast and vibration effect quantitatively with reduction ratio of pixels and line profile of the illuminated region. It was clearly observed that the characteristics of the speckle pattern in the vibration-on state were significantly improved over that of the vibration-off state due to time-averaged smoothing.

• The Journal of the Society of Korean Medicine Diagnostics
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.37-44
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• 2016

Ultrasonic imaging is the most widely modality among modern imaging device for medical diagnosis. Nevertheless, medical ultrasound images suffer from speckle noise and low contrast. In this paper, we propose probabilistic edge map for ultrasound image edge enhancement using automatic alien algorithm. The proposed method used applied speckle reduced ultrasound imaging for edge improvement using sequentially acquired ultrasound imaging. To evaluate the performance of method, the similarity between the reference and edge enhanced image was measured by quantity analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed method considerably improves the image quality with region edge enhancement.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.140-146
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• 2016

The ultrasound imaging in medical diagnosis has become a popular modality because of its safe, noninvasive, portable, relatively inexpensive, and provides a real-time image formation. However, usefulness of ultrasound imaging is at times limited due to the presence of signal-dependent noise like as speckle. Therefore, noise reduction is very important, as various types of noise generated limits the effectiveness of medical image diagnosis. This paper introduces a speckle noise reduce algorithm using total variation denoising (TVD) in Laplacian pyramid. With this method, speckle is removed by TVD of bandpass ultrasound images in Laplacian pyramid domain. For TVD in each pyramid layer, a ${\lambda}$ is selected by trial-and-error method. The visual comparison of despeckled 'in vivo' ultrasound images from pancreas shows that the proposed method could effectively preserve edges and detailed structures while thoroughly suppressing speckle. For a Simulated B-mode image, contrast-to-noise-ratio (CNR) and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) were obtained like 4.65 dB and 14.11 dB, respectively. The results show that the proposed method can conduct better than some of the existing methods in terms of the CNR and the SNR.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.475-484
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• 2023

This study aimed to compare filters for reducing speckle noise in ultrasound images using clinical liver images. We acquired the clinical liver ultrasound images, and noisy images were obtained by adding 0.01, 0.05, 0.10, and 0.50 intensity levels of speckle noise to the liver images. The Wiener filter, median modified Wiener filter, gamma filter, and Lee filter were designed for the noisy images by setting window sizes at 3×3, 5×5, and 7×7. The coefficient of variation (COV) and contrast to noise ratio (CNR) were calculated to evaluate noise reduction and various filters. Moreover, the filter with the highest image quality was selected and quantitatively compared to a noisy image. As a result, COV and CNR showed the noise improved result when the Lee filter was applied. Furthermore, the Lee filter image with a window size of 7×7 was noted to possess approximately a minimum of 1.28 to a maximum of 3.38 times better COV and a minimum of 2.18 to a maximum of 5.50 times better CNR than the noisy image. In conclusion, we confirmed that the Lee filter was effective in reducing speckle noise and proved that an appropriate window size needs to be set considering blurring.

• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.12-15
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• 1990

Holospeckle interferometry, the combined technique of holographic interferometry and speckle photography, was applied to the measurement of 3-D contact deformation created by an indentor. This new tech$.$ nique makes possible to measure both in-plane and out-of-plane displacements from one photographic plate. In this study, the optical system based on image holography was set up. In order to enhance the size and the contrast of the speckle, a proper magnification and a low reference beam ratio was used as compared with the conventional holographic interferometry technique. This system shows the magnified and clear holographic interference fringe as well as Young's fringe patterns.tterns.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.53 no.6
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• pp.7-16
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• 2011

This study discussed the applicability of satellite SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) imagery with regard to reservoir monitoring, and tried the extraction of reservoir storage from multi-temporal C-band RADARSAT-1 SAR backscattering images of Yedang and Goongpyeong agricultural reservoirs, acquired from May to October 2005. SAR technology has been advanced as a complementary and alternative approach to optical remote sensing and in-situ measurement. Water bodies in SAR imagery represent low brightness induced by low backscattering, and reservoir storage can be derived from the backscatter contrast with the level-area-volume relationship of each reservoir. The threshold segmentation over the routine preprocessing of SAR images such as speckle reduction and low-pass filtering concluded a significant correlation between the SAR-derived reservoir storage and the observation record in spite of the considerable disagreement. The result showed up critical limitations for adopting SAR data to reservoir monitoring as follows: the inappropriate specifications of SAR data, the unreliable rating curve of reservoir, the lack of climatic information such as wind and precipitation, the interruption of inside and neighboring land cover, and so on. Furthermore, better accuracy of SAR-based reservoir monitoring could be expected through different alternatives such as multi-sensor image fusion, water level measurement with altimeters or interferometry, etc.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.36 no.12
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• pp.1529-1534
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• 2012

In this study, tensile tests for 12-${\mu}m$-thick copper thin foils were performed by using the DIC method. The DIC method provided precise stress-strain curves for thin film materials, and a commercial inkjet printer can be simply and effectively used for printing speckle patterns on the specimen of Cu thin films whose surface contrast is too low to apply the DIC method. The mechanical properties of Cu thin foils obtained in this study are as follows: elastic modulus E = 89.2 GPa, 0.2% offset yield stress $S_{0.2%}$= 232.8 MPa, tensile strength $S_u$= 319.2 MPa, elongation at fracture ${\varepsilon}_f$=16.8 %, and Poisson's ratio ${\nu}$= 0.34.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.203-213
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• 2023

In medical ultrasound imaging systems, Side lobes may appear if signals outside the imaging point are not completely removed during receive focusing. If the time signal of the side lobe overlaps with the time signal (main lobe) from the image point, it is difficult to completely remove it using filter processing in the time domain. However, In the receive focusing process, when time-channel signals are Fourier-transformed, the main lobe and side lobe signals are spatially separated in the spectral domain. Therefore, the side lobes can be suppressed by multiplying the image with magnitude weights, which are determined by the magnitudes of the main and side lobes calculated in the spectral domain. In addition, when the main lobe and the side lobe spectrum are adjacent, the distance weight was applied based on the distance between them. In a 5 MHz ultrasound imaging system using a 64-channel linear transducer, point reflector and speckle images with cysts of various brightness were synthesized and weights were applied to the ultrasound image. Using computer simulations, we confirmed that the side lobes were greatly reduced without affecting the spatial resolution in the point reflector image, and the contrast was significantly improved in the cyst image with computer simulations.