• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.45-51
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• 2022

Sound quality evaluation is one of the psychoacoustic methods to measure subjective judgements for sound color. The purpose of this study is to investigate sound quality benefits of bimodal users by comparing sound quality scores between bimodal hearing condition and unilateral cochlear implant(CI) condition as a preliminary study. Thirteen bimodal users and seven unilateral CI users were participated in this study. Audiologists performed pure tone and speech audiometry and measured functional gain and real-ear insertion gain. Subjective assessment of sound quality was followed with four sounds including violin sound, male and female voices, and refrigerator noise. Participants judged the sound quality with six sound quality index. Bimodal users showed mean 0.8 points more sound quality improvements in bimodal condition than unilateral CI condition. Group comparison between bimodal and unilateral CI users showed no differences. A follow-up study of sound quality tools and methods should be considered to evaluate subjective bimodal benefits of cochlear implant users.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.484-498
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to explore the applicability of QFD to product development of clothes by empirically applying it to development of a specific clothes, middle and elderly women’s formal knitwear. The voices of customers(VOCs) for formal knitwear was collected through in-depth interviews with 25 customers, shop masters, and designers. Also, questionnaires of which respondents were 230 customers were used to rank the importance of the items of VOC. A QFD team of 10 knitwear experts implemented the task of translating VOCs into design attributes and measuring the values of the relationships between VOCs and design attributes. Importance ranking of the items of design attributes was obtained based on Lyman's method. The results of this study were as follows. First, the customer requirements for formal knitwear were classified into five dimensions, that is, symbolism, aesthetic, fitness, usefulness, and maintenance. Second, the descending order of the necessity of improving the quality was maintenance, aesthetic, fitness, usefulness, and symbolism. Third, three-staged design attributes were obtained as a result of translating of VOCs into design attributes. Lastly, the descending order of the importance of design attributes was "sorts of yarn", "sorts of color jacquard", "color", "tone", "ease", etc.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.1218-1228
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• 2016

This paper proposes a robot hand for a violin-playing robot and introduces a newly developed robot finger. The proposed robot hand acts as the left hand of the violin-playing robot system. The violin fingering plays an important role in determining the tone or sound when the violin is being played. Among the diverse types of violin fingering playing, it is not possible to produce vibrato with simple position control. Therefore, we newly designed a three-axis load cell for force control, which is mounted at the end of the robot finger. Noise is calculated through an analysis of the resistance difference across the strain gauge attached to the proposed three-axis load cell. In order to ensure the stability of the three-axis load cell by analyzing the stress distribution, the strain generated in the load cell is also verified through a finite element analysis. A sound rating quality system previously developed by the authors is used to compare and analyze the sound quality of the fourth-octave C-note played by a human violinist and the proposed robot finger.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.32 no.10
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• pp.1509-1521
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• 2008

The subjects of this study were middle-aged women in their 40s$\sim$50s and older women aged 60 and over who were living in Seoul and Kyonggi-do, Korea. Through studying the participants' responses to the questions regarding the attributes of apparel quality in terms of the levels of satisfaction and importance, the target consumers' demand has been studied. And, they are applied to a QFD Matrix, to find out the relationship between the attributes of product quality and the guidelines of clothing design. For this study, apparel product quality is composed of five parameters: practicality, aesthetics, brand image, ease of care and fit. For the parameters of apparel product quality, the result of this study show that product improvements are needed in fit, aesthetics and practicality(in order of importance). The level of satisfaction(how satisfied consumer feels) was marked higher in brand image than that of importance(how important it is). To review demands for the apparel product attributes of formal suits for middle-aged and older women, the priority of these attributes through QFD Matrix that shows the relationship between the attributes and dress elements emphasized by designers has been examined. Material was the most important design element in designing formal suits. The shape of the pants was the second because the harmony between the jacket and the pants is important in formal suits. These were followed by trim and color tone of the jacket.

• Nutrition Research and Practice
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.606-620
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• 2020

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Although some juices affect subjective sleep quality, there is a lack of information on the effect of a specific juice on objective sleep quality and heart rate variability (HRV) during sleep; thus the present study investigated whether a blended juice made from natural extracts influenced sleep quality and HRV during sleep in adults with disturbed sleep. SUBJECTS/METHODS: A randomized, crossover study was conducted on twenty-five adults (15/10, female/male) complaining of difficulty initiating or maintaining nighttime sleep (Pittsburgh sleep quality index [PSQI] ≥ 5). During feeding sessions (FS), subjects received sleep-inducing juice made of natural ingredients (250 mL/trial) twice a day for 8 weeks or non-FS (N-FS) for 8 weeks while maintaining normal activities. Sleep quality and parameters were recorded via wearable actigraph for 7 consecutive days, and PSQI scores were assessed before and after the intervention. HRV was also monitored at rest and during sleep. RESULTS: After receiving the sleep-inducing juice intervention (FS), PSQI scores were significantly decreased (P < 0.001) and correlated with a significant decline in fatigue severity scale and visual analogue scale levels (P < 0.05; both). HRV indices of vagal activity were significantly improved during FS (P < 0.05), and no significant differences in N-FS were observed. Sleep efficiency and total sleep time increased significantly (P < 0.05) and sleep latency, total counts, sleep fragmentation index, and movement index, decreased significantly (P < 0.05, all 4) during FS, with no significant differences-observed during N-FS. CONCLUSIONS: This study results demonstrated that an 8-week course of sleep-inducing juice has led to improve sleep quality, suggesting an enhanced cardiac vagal tone during sleep. Thus, it could be a well-tolerated option for adults with disturbed sleep.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.367-374
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose an audio watermarking method using the attribute of tonal masker. First, the attribute of tonal masker as an audio watermarking attribute is analyzed. According to existing researches, it is possible to be imperceptible modulation for the energies of the frequencies that compose a tonal masker. And when the relation between the tone energy and the left or right frequency energy after various signal processing is compared with the one before the processing, very few changes are showed. We propose an audio watermarking method using these attributes of tonal masker. A watermark bit is embedded by the modulation of the difference between the two neighboring frequency energies of a tone. In the detection, the modulated the tonal masker is searched using the key wed in the embedding without original audio and the embedded watermark bit is detected. After each attack of noise insertion, band-pass filtering, re-sampling, compression, echo transform and equalization, the detection error ratios of the proposed method were average 0.11%, 1.26% for Classics and Pops. And the SDG(Subjective Diff-Grades) scale evaluation of the sound quality of the watermarked audio result in the average SDG -0.31.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.27-36
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• 2009

PSTN (public switched telephone network) provides voice communication service, whereas IP network provides data oriented service, and we can use IP network for multimedia transport service (e.g. voice over IP service) with economic price. In this paper, we propose RoIP (robot on IP) service scenario, signaling call flow, and implementation to provide home automation and monitoring service for remote site users. In our scheme, we used a extended SIP (session initiation protocol) for signaling protocol between remote site users and home robots. For our bearer transport control, we implemented H.263 video codec over RTP (real-time transport protocol) and additionally DTMF (dual tone multi-frequency) transport for robot actuator control. We implemented our scheme on home robots and experimented with KTF operator network, and it shows good communication quality (average MOS = 9.15) and flexible robot controls.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.4 s.316
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• pp.17-25
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• 2007

Multilevel inkjet printer employs multiple ink droplets with variable dot size and/or different concentrations intended to preserve high fidelity color reproduction and the appearance of continuous tone. A variety of research efforts on multitoning techniques has progressed toward better image quality. However, banding artifacts appear due to the same dot distributions near the printable output levels. This results in discontinuity and visually unpleasing output, especially at the smooth tone transition region. In this paper, to reduce the banding artifacts, a multitoning method to arrange ink distribution by controlling the blending proportion of adjacent output pixels based on an improved threshold scaling function is proposed. Ink distributions across the banding regions are changed according to two factors of the threshold scaling function because these factors handle the blending point of adjacent output pixel. Therefore, 8 observers, subjectively investigated ink distributions around the printable output levels for a set of the improved threshold scaling function. For a threshold scaling function with the specific factor values, we can achieve smoother visual transition. In the experiment, the proposed method showed a reduction of banding artifacts in both u-ay and color image and represented better Performance of color reproduction.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.130-139
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• 2013

This paper proposes a new approach for enhancing digital images based on red channel information, which has the most analogous characteristics to invisible infrared rays. Specifically, a red channel in RGB space is used to analyze the image contents and improve the visual quality of the input images but it can cause unexpected problems, such as the over-enhancement of reddish input images. To resolve this problem, inter-channel correlations between the color channels were derived, and the weighting parameters for visually pleasant image fusion were estimated. Applying the parameters resulted in significant brightness as well as improvement in the dark and bright regions. Furthermore, simple contrast and color corrections were used to maintain the original contrast level and color tone. The main advantages of the proposed algorithm are 1) it can improve a given image considerably with a simple inter-channel correlation, 2) it can obtain a similar effect of using an extra infrared image, and 3) it is faster than other algorithms compared without artifacts including halo effects. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach could produce better natural images than the existing enhancement algorithms. Therefore, the proposed scheme can be a useful tool for improving the image quality in consumer imaging devices, such as compact cameras.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2004.08a
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• pp.1355-1359
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• 2004

The two way subscriber transmission systems have tendency to spread its carrier frequency bandwidth or information bit rate and average bit error rate according to popularization of high speed information through the digital communication system, transmission medium and the Internet. This fact is an important incentive to realize new systems. These two way subscriber transmission systems usually use same cable or same carrier frequency bandwidth for up stream channel and down stream channel. In the systems, the disturbances of noise, crosstalk or fading affect the characteristics. Specifically, these disturbances cause the decrease of information bit rate and degradation of transmission quality. This paper proposes the improved method of their degradations using the particular feature of two way subscriber transmission systems and it makes clear proposed method is effective by theoretically and some numerical examples.