• Journal of Conservation Science
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.14-32
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• 2022

Underwater photographing and image recording are essential for pre-excavation survey and during excavation in underwater archaeology. Unlike photographing on land, all underwater images suffer various quality degradations such as shape distortions, color shift, blur, low contrast, high noise levels and so on. Outcome is very often heavily photographing equipment and photographer dependent. Excavation schedule, weather conditions, and water conditions can put burdens on divers. Usable images are very limited compared to the efforts. In underwater archaeological study in very turbid water such as in the Yellow Sea (between mainland China and the Korean peninsula), underwater photographing is very challenging. In this study, off-site image distortion and color compensation techniques using an image processing/analysis software is investigated as an alternative image quality enhancement method. As sample images, photographs taken during the excavation of 800-year-old Taean Mado Shipwrecks in the Yellow Sea in 2008-2010 were mainly used. Significant enhancement in distortion and color compensation of archived images were obtained by simple post image processing using image processing/analysis software (PicMan) customized for given view ports, lenses and cameras with and without optical axis offsets. Post image processing is found to be very effective in distortion and color compensation of both recent and archived images from various photographing equipment models and configurations. Merits and demerit of in-situ, distortion and color compensated photographing with sophisticated equipment and conventional photographing equipment, which requires post image processing, are compared.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.132-140
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• 2023

In this paper, we propose a method for performance enhancement of speech declipping using clipping detector. Clipping occurs when the input speech level exceeds the dynamic range of microphone, and it significantly degrades the speech quality. Recently, many methods for high-performance speech declipping based on machine learning have been developed. However, they often deteriorate the speech signal because of degradation in signal reconstruction process when the degree of clipping is not high. To solve this problem, we propose a new approach that combines the declipping network and clipping detector, which enables a selective declipping operation depending on the clipping level and provides high-quality speech in all clipping levels. We measured the declipping performance using various metrics and confirmed that the proposed method improves the average performance over all clipping levels, compared with the conventional methods, and greatly improves the performance when the clipping distortion is small.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.200-208
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• 2010

In this work, the minimum statistics (MS) algorithm is combined with the codebook driven short-term predictor parameter estimation (CDSTP) to design a speech enhancement algorithm that is robust against various background noise environments. The MS algorithm functions well for the stationary noise but relatively not for the non-stationary noise. The CDSTP works efficiently for the non-stationary noise, but not for the noise that was not considered in the training stage. Thus, we propose to combine CDSTP and MS. Compared with the single use of MS and CDSTP, the proposed method produces better perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) score, and especially works excellent for the mixed background noise between stationary and non-stationary noises.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.75-82
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• 2020

We identify the enhancement effects of zinc chloride and liquid nitrogen on low quality ninhydrin-developed fingerprint and we wanted to find out another cooling methods available for ninhydrin/Zn fingerprint enhancement besides the liquid nitrogen, which is hard to access. Artificial sweat was used to make the same level of fingerprints, and fingerprints developed by each technique were evaluated by SWGFAST standard and compared the average score and standard deviation. As a result of the experiment, ninhydrin/Zn-liquid nitrogen got 3.2 and 3.3 as average scores that enough to identify an individual such as 1,2-IND/Zn or DFO. Also, experiments using dry ice instead of liquid nitrogen as a way of the ninhydrin/Zn-developed fingerprints enhancement resulted in 3.0 and 2.9 as average scores, therefore, it was confirmed that dry ice is also a sufficient cooling method to be considered in practice in the field of forensic science.

• Journal of Veterinary Clinics
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.135-142
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• 2021

The aim of this study was to evaluate the contrast effect if a saline flush following low-volume contrast medium bolus improves vascular and parenchymal enhancement using a saphenous vein in abdominal CT for small animals. Six clinically healthy beagle dogs underwent abdominal contrast-enhanced CT. They were divided into nine groups (each group, n = 6), according to the volume of contrast medium 1, 2, and 3 mL/kg, and volume of the saline solution 0, 5, and 10 mL. Dynamic CT scanning was performed at the hepatic hilum level. The maximum contrast enhancement, time to maximum enhancement, and time to equilibrium phase were calculated from the time attenuation curves. Mean attenuation values for all groups were measured in the aorta, portal vein, and liver. After contrast enhancement, grading of image quality regarding surrounding artifacts and evaluation of the hepatic hilum structures was performed. For comparison of the effect of the contrast material and saline solution doses, differences in mean attenuation values between the contrast medium 2 mL/kg without saline flush group and the remaining groups, and between contrast medium 3 mL/kg without saline flush group and the remaining groups, were analyzed for statistical significance. There were no significant differences between with and without saline flushing at the same contrast medium dose groups. There were no significant differences in peak values between the 3 mL/kg dose of contrast medium alone and the 2 mL/kg dose of contrast medium with saline solution flush. However, there was a significant difference in peak values between the 3 mL/kg dose of the contrast medium without the saline flush group and the 2 mL/kg dose of the contrast medium alone group. Grades of the artifacts were not significantly different in the saline flush regardless of the dose of the contrast medium. Using 2 mL/kg of contrast medium with saline solution flush resulted in similar liver parenchyma attenuation, compared with using 3 mL/kg of contrast medium without saline solution flush. In CT evaluation of hepatic parenchymal diseases, using 2 mL/kg of contrast medium with saline solution flush may yield decreased risk of contrast nephropathy and cost-saving.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.8
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• pp.383-388
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• 2006

This Paper presents a novel approach to single channel microphone speech enhancement in noisy environments. Widely used noise reduction techniques based on the spectral subtraction are generally expressed as a spectral gam depending on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The well-known decision-directed(DD) estimator of Ephraim and Malah efficiently reduces musical noise under the background noise conditions, but generates the delay of the a prioiri SNR because the DD weights the speech spectrum component of the Previous frame in the speech signal. Therefore, the noise suppression gain which is affected by the delay of the a priori SNR, which is estimated by the DD matches the previous frame rather than the current one, so after noise suppression. this degrades the noise reduction performance during speech transient periods. We propose a computationally simple but effective speech enhancement technique based on the sigmoid type function for the weight Parameter of the DD. The proposed approach solves the delay problem about the main parameter, the a priori SNR of the DD while maintaining the benefits of the DD. Performances of the proposed enhancement algorithm are evaluated by ITU-T p.862 Perceptual Evaluation of Speech duality (PESQ). the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and the speech spectrogram under various noise environments and yields better results compared with the fixed weight parameter of the DD.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.123-131
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• 2005

Among the digital halftoning, the error diffusion halftoning gives better subjective quality than other halftoning techniques. But it also makes edges of objects blurred. To overcome the defect, this paper proposes the modified error diffusion halftoning algorithm to enhance the edges using the spatial perceptual properties of the human visual system. Using the properties that the human eyes perceive not the pixel's luminance itself but the local average luminance and the information that human eyes perceive spatial variation, the proposed method computes information of edge enhancement(IEE). The IEE is added to the quantizer's input pixel and feeds into the halftoning quantizer. The quantizer produces the halftone image having the enhanced edge. Also this paper proposes the technique that the coefficients of the error diffusion filter are adapted according to the correlation among color components. The computer simulation results show that the proposed method produces finer halftoning images than conventional methods due to the enhanced edges. And the proposed method also preserves similar in edges to original image and reduces some defects such as color impulse and false contours.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.8A
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• pp.656-663
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• 2005

This paper presents a multi-channel enhancement scheme for the MAC protocol of IEEE 802.15.3 High-rate WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Network). The current MAC protocol of the IEEE 802.15.3 High-rate WPAN is designed for sharing a single channel among DEVs of a piconet; that is, within a single piconet, PNC prevents interference through MAC layer assignment of time slots to other DEVs using time-division multiple access. When the number of DEVs that communicate with each other frequently, is increased in a single WPAN, the size of the superframe becomes inevitably large, and this may result in a significant throughput drop or a failure to provide QoS guarantee. A multi-channel enhancement scheme for the MAC protocol of IEEE 802.15.3 High-rate WPAN is proposed to significantly increase the aguegate throughput and more reliably provide the QoS guarantees in a piconet

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.368-379
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• 2010

As high-definition video is broadly used in various system such as broadcast system and digital camcorder the proper method in order to improve the quality of high-definition video is needed. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to improve color and contrast of high-definition video. In order to apply the image enhancement method to high-definition video, scale-down video of high-definition video is used and the parameter for image enhancement method is computed from small size video. To enhance the color of high-definition video, we apply color constancy method. First, we separate the video into several scenes by cut detection method. Then, we apply color constancy to each scene with same parameter. To improve the contrast of high-definition video, we use union of original image and histogram equalized image, and weight is calculated based on sorting of histogram bins. Finally, the performance of proposed method is demonstrated in experiment section.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.363-370
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• 2017

In this paper, we proposed a low-complexity speech enhancement algorithm based on a improved minima controlled recursive averaging (IMCRA) and log minimum mean square error (logMMSE). The IMCRA algorithm track the minima value of input power within buffers in local window and identify the speech presence using ratio between input power and its minima value. In this process, many number of operations are required. To reduce the number of operations of IMCRA algorithm, minima value is tracked using time-varying frequency-dependent smoothing based on speech presence probability. The proposed algorithm enhanced speech quality by 2.778%, 3.481%, 2.980% and 2.162% in 0, 5, 10 and 15dB SNR respectively and reduced computational complexity by average 9.570%.