• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.719-741
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• 2014

Monitoring surface cracks is important to ensure the health of concrete structures. However, traditional visual inspection to monitor the concrete cracks has disadvantages such as subjective inspection nature, associated time and cost, and possible danger to inspectors. To alter the visual inspection, a complete procedure for automated crack assessment based on adaptive digital image processing has been proposed in this study. Crack objects are extracted from the images using the subtraction with median filter and the local binarization using the Niblack's method. To adaptively. determine the optimal window sizes for the median filter and the Niblack's method without distortion of crack object an optimal filter size index (OFSI) is proposed. From the extracted crack objects using the optimal size of window, the crack objects are decomposed to the crack skeletons and edges, and the crack width is calculated using 4-connected normal line according to the orientation of the local skeleton line. For an image, a crack width nephogram is obtained to have an intuitive view of the crack distribution. The proposed procedure is verified from a test on a concrete reaction wall with various types of cracks. From the crack images with different crack widths and patterns, the widths of cracks in the order of submillimeters are calculated with high accuracy.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.283-300
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• 2015

Visual condition inspections remain paramount to assessing the current deterioration status of a bridge and assigning remediation or maintenance tasks so as to ensure the ongoing serviceability of the structure. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing backlog of maintenance activities. Existing research reveals that this is attributable to the labour-intensive, subjective and disruptive nature of the current bridge inspection method. Current processes ultimately require lane closures, traffic guidance schemes and inspection equipment. This not only increases the whole-of-life costs of the bridge, but also increases the risk to the travelling public as issues affecting the structural integrity may go unaddressed. As a tool for bridge condition inspections, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or, drones, offer considerable potential, allowing a bridge to be visually assessed without the need for inspectors to walk across the deck or utilise under-bridge inspection units. With current inspection processes placing additional strain on the existing bridge maintenance resources, the technology has the potential to significantly reduce the overall inspection costs and disruption caused to the travelling public. In addition to this, the use of automated aerial image capture enables engineers to better understand a situation through the 3D spatial context offered by UAV systems. However, the use of UAV for bridge inspection involves a number of critical issues to be resolved, including stability and accuracy of control, and safety to people. SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) is a technique that could be used by a UAV to build a map of the bridge underneath, while simultaneously determining its location on the constructed map. While there are considerable economic and risk-related benefits created through introducing entirely new ways of inspecting bridges and visualising information, there also remain hindrances to the wider deployment of UAVs. This study is to provide a context for use of UAVs for conducting visual bridge inspections, in addition to addressing the obstacles that are required to be overcome in order for the technology to be integrated into current practice.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.13-23
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• 2001

Most current machine vision systems for industrial inspection were developed with one specific task in mind. Hence, these systems are inflexible in the sense that they cannot easily be adapted to other applications. In this paper, a general vision system framework has been developed that can be easily adapted to a variety of industrial web inspection problems. The objective of this system is to automatically locate and identify \\\"defects\\\" on the surface of the material being inspected. This framework is designed to be robust, to be flexible, and to be as computationally simple as possible. To assure robustness this framework employs a combined strategy of top-down and bottom-up control, hierarchical defect models, and uncertain reasoning methods. To make this framework flexible, a modular Blackboard framework is employed. To minimize computational complexity the system incorporates a simple multi-thresholding segmentation scheme, a fuzzy logic focus of attention mechanism for scene analysis operations, and a partitioning if knowledge that allows concurrent parallel processing during recognition.cognition.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.261-266
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• 2002

Up to now a wide variety of researches on inpipe robots for inspection have been introduced, but it still seems to be difficult to construct a robot providing mobility sufficient to navigate inside the complicated configuration of underground pipelines. The robot for the inspection of pipelines should freely move along the basic configuration of pipelines such as along horizontal or vertical pipelines. Moreover it should be able to travel along reducers and elbows, and especially the capability for steering in branches is essential to it. In this report, citical points and technologies in the development of the inpipe inspection robots are introduced and inpipe robots developed for last several years are introduced.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.327-328
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• 2006

Recently, as the infocomindustry is developed, the semiconductor industry as well as the optical industry such as the optical communication and the optical instrument is developed rapidly. The transmission, storage and processing of information has been reaching an limit because amounts of information increase rapidly. The more quickly the optical communication is developed, the more sharply the demand of optical elements increase. The transport and inspection process is time consuming and the error rate is high, because this process are not automated in case of an optical lens. In this paper, the pick-up system that can hold optical elements and be transferred by the ultrasonic transport system is developed. The inspection system that distinguishes between the existence and the nonexistence of a defect is connected easily to pick-up system. The pick-up system separates the optical glass lens by results of the inspection. The automation program is developed by visual c++ programming.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.81-88
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• 2011

Mini Double Gears Frame is critical part of PDP and also produces couple hundred thousand every month. In the process of mass production, product inspection is very important process. Double Gear, one of the part of machine, was inspected by human eyes which caused mistakes and slow progress. To achieve the speed and accuracy the system was compensated by vision system which is inspecting automatically. The focus value is measured based on the fact that high contrast images have much high frequency edge information. High frequency term of the image is extracted using the high-pass filter and the sum of the high frequency term is used as the focus value. We used a Gaussian smoothing filter to reduce the noise and then measures the focus value using the modified Laplacian filter called a Sum modified Laplacian Focus values for the various lens positions are calculated and the position with the maximum focus value is decided as the focused position. The focus values calculated in various lens position showed the Gaussian distribution. We proposed a method to estimate the best focus position using the Gaussian curve fitting. Focus values of the uniform interval lens positions are calculated and the values are used to estimate the Gaussian distribution parameters to find the best focus position.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.83-88
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• 2021

Recently, due to the aging of workers and the weakening of the labor base in the automobile industry, research on quality inspection methods through ICT(Information and Communication Technology) convergence is being actively conducted. A lot of research has already been done on the development of an automated system for quality inspection in the manufacturing process using image processing. However, there is a limit to detecting defects occurring in the automotive sunroof sealer application process, which is the subject of this study, only by image processing using a general camera. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a system construction method that collects image information using a infrared thermal imaging camera for the sunroof sealer application process and detects possible product defects based on the SVM(Support Vector Machine) algorithm. The proposed system construction method was actually tested and applied to auto parts makers equipped with the sunroof sealer application process, and as a result, the superiority, reliability, and field applicability of the proposed method were proven.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.28 no.11
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• pp.21-28
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• 2023

In manufacturing companies that focus on small-scale production of multiple product varieties, defective products are manually selected by workers rather than relying on automated inspection. Consequently, there is a higher risk of incorrect sorting due to variations in selection criteria based on the workers' experience and expertise, without consistent standards. Moreover, for non-standardized flexible objects with varying sizes and shapes, there can be even greater deviations in the selection criteria. To address these issues, this paper designs a quality inspection system using artificial intelligence-based unsupervised learning methods and conducts research by experimenting with accuracy using a dataset obtained from real manufacturing environments.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2024.07a
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• pp.1168-1176
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• 2024

For reusable Temporary Structure Elements such as scaffolding and temporary supports, quality control tasks are currently carried out through visual inspections by quality management workers and subjective judgments. Regarding quality tests based on the KOSHA(Korea Occupational Safety & Health Agency) system, only three pieces are sampled regardless of the quantity received at the site. On the other hand, although there is ongoing technological research on an automatic quality inspection of temporary structure elements, relevant stakeholders' introduction of such systems is hindered by issues such as cost. Therefore, this study aims to review a business model for introducing a quantitative and automated quality inspection system for reusable temporary structure elements. The study intends to propose application methods for each component according to a template and establish the business model by conducting interviews and collecting basic data for each template component. The results of this research are expected to serve as a foundation for implementation and expanding the adoption of quality management for temporary structure elements using smart technologies in the future.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.37-42
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• 2010

The stay cylinder weld at the steam generator of Korean Standard Nuclear Power Plants is safety class I component and is subjected to be inspected by the volumetric examination such as ultrasonic method. As accessibility of this area is limited due to the narrow space and high radiation, the existing manual inspection method involves various difficulties. Moreover operators may be exposed to internal contamination by contaminated dust during the surface buffing process to improve the inspection reliability of this area. Recently the new automatic inspection system for stay cylinder welds has been developed. The inspection system basically consists of a driving assembly, data acquisition device and signal processing units. The driving assembly is classified by 1) the scanner for inspecting and buffing the weld, 2) pillars for guiding the scanner and 3) the base frame for loading and supporting pillars. The scanner has 4 sensor modules to inspect in 4 refracted angles and 4 incident directions. These components can be inserted into the skirt of the stay cylinder through the manway hole and assembled easily by one-touch in the skirt. Data acquisition device and signal processing units developed in previous works are also newly upgraded for better processing of data analysis and evaluation. The system has been successfully demonstrated not only in the mock-up but also in the field. In this paper, newly developed inspection system for the stay cylinder weld of the steam generator is introduced and their field applications are discussed.