• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.840-847
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• 2022

In a deep neural network (DNN)-based speech enhancement, using global and local input speech information is closely related to model performance. Recently, a nested U-Net structure that utilizes global and local input data information using multi-scale has bee n proposed. This nested U-Net was also applied to speech enhancement and showed outstanding performance. However, a single skip connection used in nested U-Nets must be modified for the nested structure. In this paper, we propose a multi-level skip connection (MLS) to optimize the performance of the nested U-Net-based speech enhancement algorithm. As a result, the proposed MLS showed excellent performance improvement in various objective evaluation metrics compared to the standard skip connection, which means th at the MLS can optimize the performance of the nested U-Net-based speech enhancement algorithm. In addition, the final proposed m odel showed superior performance compared to other DNN-based speech enhancement models.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.253-259
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• 2024

This paper proposes a new speech enhancement model based on a complex nested U-Net with a dual-branch decoder. The proposed model consists of a complex nested U-Net to simultaneously estimate the magnitude and phase components of the speech signal, and the decoder has a dual-branch decoder structure that performs spectral mapping and time-frequency masking in each branch. At this time, compared to the single-branch decoder structure, the dual-branch decoder structure allows noise to be effectively removed while minimizing the loss of speech information. The experiment was conducted on the VoiceBank + DEMAND database, commonly used for speech enhancement model training, and was evaluated through various objective evaluation metrics. As a result of the experiment, the complex nested U-Net-based speech enhancement model using a dual-branch decoder increased the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) score by about 0.13 compared to the baseline, and showed a higher objective evaluation score than recently proposed speech enhancement models.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.228-230
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• 2022

본 논문은 최근 잡음 제거에서 우수한 성능을 보인 Nested U-Net의 성능을 최적화하기 위하여 두 단계로 이루어진 two-level skip connection (TLS)을 제안하였다. 이때, 인코더와 디코더의 경로를 다르게 하여 다양한 형태의 TLS을 제안하고 각 형태의 성능을 비교 평가하였다. 또한, 가장 좋은 성능을 보인 두 개의 경로를 조합하여 최종 Nested U-Net 기반 모델을 제안하였다. 제안된 모델은 다른 잡음 제거 모델과 비교하여 객관적인 평가 지표에서 매우 우수한 성능을 보인다.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.39 no.8
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• pp.17-28
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• 2023

Laboratory-scale hydraulic fracturing experiments were conducted on granite specimens at various viscosities and injection rates of the fracturing fluid. A series of cross-sectional computed tomography (CT) images of fractured specimens was obtained via a three-dimensional X-ray CT imaging method. Pixel-level fracture segmentation of the CT images was conducted using a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based Nested U-Net model structure. Compared with traditional image processing methods, the CNN-based model showed a better performance in the extraction of thin and complex fractures. These extracted fractures extracted were reconstructed in three dimensions and morphologically analyzed based on their fracture volume, aperture, tortuosity, and surface roughness. The fracture volume and aperture increased with the increase in viscosity of the fracturing fluid, while the tortuosity and roughness of the fracture surface decreased. The findings also confirmed the anisotropic tortuosity and roughness of the fracture surface. In this study, a CNN-based model was used to perform accurate fracture segmentation, and quantitative analysis of hydraulic stimulated fractures was conducted successfully.