• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.157-168
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• 2016

In image processing and computer vision fields, mean squared error (MSE) has popularly been used as an objective metric in image quality optimization problems due to its desirable mathematical properties such as metricability, differentiability and convexity. However, as known that MSE is not highly correlated with perceived visual quality, much effort has been made to develop new image quality assessment (IQA) metrics having both the desirable mathematical properties aforementioned and high prediction performances for subjective visual quality scores. Although recent IQA metrics having the desirable mathematical properties have shown to give some promising results in prediction performance for visual quality scores, they also have high computation complexities. In order to alleviate this problem, we propose a new fast IQA metric using a simple Laplace operator. Since the Laplace operator used in our IQA metric can not only effectively mimic operations of receptive fields in retina for luminance stimulus but also be simply computed, our IQA metric can yield both very fast processing speed and high prediction performance. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed IQA metric, our method is compared to some state-of-the-art IQA metrics. The experimental results showed that the proposed IQA metric has the fastest running speed compared the IQA methods except MSE under comparison. Moreover, our IQA metric achieves the best prediction performance for subjective image quality scores among the state-of-the-art IQA metrics under test.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.230-241
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• 2007

This paper presents the requirements analysis for the Terrestrial DMB Automatic Emergency Alert Service (AEAS) Standard. First, the basic concepts in disaster management and the AEAS system structure are presented as a background. Next, other emergency alert systems and the related standards are analyzed. We propose taxonomy to categorize the emergency alert systems and analyze the characteristics of each system. Next, we analyze advantages of T-DMB for the delivery medium of emergency alert message and problems to resolve for the enhanced performance. Finally, we propose service requirements which will achieve general/special-purpose, non-interrupting, location-adaptive, automatic, message delivery service. The paper will contribute as a guideline to the development for emergency alert service standards for other broadcasting media.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.732-743
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• 2008

In H.264/AVC, 4$\times$4 block transform is used for intra and inter prediction instead of 8$\times$8 block transform. Using small block size coding, H.264/AVC obtains high temporal prediction efficiency, however, it has limitation in utilizing spatial redundancy. Motivated on these points, we propose a multi-dimensional transform which achieves both the accuracy of temporal prediction as well as effective use of spatial redundancy. From preliminary experiments, the proposed multi-dimensional transform achieves higher energy compaction than 2-D DCT used in H.264. We designed an integer-based transform and quantization coder for multi-dimensional coder. Moreover, several additional methods for multi-dimensional coder are proposed, which are cube forming, scan order, mode decision and updating parameters. The Context-based Adaptive Variable-Length Coding (CAVLC) used in H.264 was employed for the entropy coder. Simulation results show that the performance of the multi-dimensional codec appears similar to that of H.264 in lower bit rates although the rate-distortion curves of the multi-dimensional DCT measured by entropy and the number of non-zero coefficients show remarkably higher performance than those of H.264/AVC. This implies that more efficient entropy coder optimized to the statistics of multi-dimensional DCT coefficients and rate-distortion operation are needed to take full advantage of the multi-dimensional DCT. There remains many issues and future works about multi-dimensional coder to improve coding efficiency over H.264/AVC.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.685-695
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• 2008

This paper presents a method to segment the object of interest from a set of multi-view images with minimal user interaction. Specifically, after the user segments an initial image, we first estimate the transformations between foreground and background of the segmented image and the neighboring image, respectively. From these transformations, we obtain regions in the neighboring image that respectively correspond to the foreground and the background of the segmented image. We are then able to segment the neighboring image based on these regions, and iterate this process to segment the whole image set. Transformation of foregrounds are estimated by feature-based registration with free-form deformation, while transformation of backgrounds are estimated by homography constrained to affine transformation. Here, both are based on correspondence point pairs. Segmentation is done by estimating pixel color distributions and defining a shape prior based on the obtained foreground and background regions and applying them to a Markov random field (MRF) energy minimization framework for image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.859-871
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• 2013

In this paper, we propose an algorithm that generates multi-view images by grid-mesh based image domain warping using occlusion mask and various image features obtained from the stereoscopic images. In the proposed algorithm, we first extract image saliency map, line segments and disparity saliency map from stereo images and then get them through a process that improves the quality of extracted features. This process is accomplished in two steps. In the first step, reliability of disparity saliency map on object boundary regions is enhanced by using occlusion information. And in the second step, we enhance the quality of image features in terms of temporal consistency by using temporal consistency information for stereo images. With these enhanced features, multi-view images are generated by grid-mesh based image domain warping technique. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than existing algorithms in terms of visual quality.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.1-14
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• 2017

This paper proposes adaptive reference structure decision method to improve the performance of HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) encoder. When an event occurs in the input sequence, such as scene change, scene rotation, fade in/out, or light on/off, the proposed algorithm changes the reference structure to improve the inter prediction performance. The proposed algorithm divides GOP (Group Of Pictures) into two sub-groups based on the picture that has such event and decides the reference pictures in the divided sub-groups. Also, this paper proposes fast encoding method which changes the picture type of first encoded picture in the GOP that has such event to CRA (Clean Random Access). With the statistical feature that intra prediction is selected by high probability for the first encoded picture in the GOP carrying such event, the proposed fast encoding method does not operate inter prediction. The experimental result shows that the proposed adaptive reference structure decision method improves the BD-rate 0.3% and reduces encoding time 4.9% on average under the CTC (Common Test Condition) for standardization. In addition, the proposed reference structure decision method with the picture type change reduces the average encoding time 12.2% with 0.11% BD-rate loss.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.282-294
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a novel intelligent headlight control (IHC) system which is durable to various road lights and camera movement caused by vehicle driving. For detecting candidate light blobs, the region of interest (ROI) is decided as front ROI (FROI) and back ROI (BROI) by considering the camera geometry based on perspective range estimation model. Then, light blobs such as headlights, taillights of vehicles, reflection light as well as the surrounding road lighting are segmented using two different adaptive thresholding. From the number of segmented blobs, taillights are first detected using the redness checking and random forest classifier based on Haar-like feature. For the headlight and taillight classification, we use the random forest instead of popular support vector machine or convolutional neural networks for supporting fast learning and testing in real-life applications. Pairing is performed by using the predefined geometric rules, such as vertical coordinate similarity and association check between blobs. The proposed algorithm was successfully applied to various driving sequences in night-time, and the results show that the performance of the proposed algorithms is better than that of recent related works.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.22-31
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• 2007

The proposed algorithm in this paper is based on the wavelet decomposition and the energy computation of composed blocks so the amount of calculation and complexity is minimized by adaptively replacing the DWT coefficients and managing the resources effectively. We are now living in the world of a lot. of multimedia applications for many digital electric appliances and mobile devices. Among so many multimedia applications, the digital image compression is very important technology for digital cameras to store and transmit digital images to other sites and JPEG2000 is one of the cutting edge technology to compress still images efficiently. The digital cm technology is mainly using the digital image compression features so that those images could be efficiently saved locally and transferred to other sites without any losses. JPEG2000 standard is applicable for processing the digital images usefully to keep, send and receive through wired and/or wireless networks. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is one of the main differences to the previous digital image compression standard such as JPEG, performing the DWT to the entire image rather than splitting into many blocks. Several digital images m tested with this method and restored to compare to the results of conventional DWT which shows that the proposed algorithm get the better result without any significant degradation in terms of MSE & PSNR and the number of zero coefficients when the energy based adaptive DWT is applied.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.23 no.7
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• pp.1797-1806
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• 1998

Future satellite communication systems will be developed at Ka-band (20/30 GHz) owing to the relatively wide frequency allocation and current freedom from terrestrial interference for multimedia services. A serious disadvantage of the Ka-band, however, is the very high atmospheric attenuation in rainy weather. Synchronous CDMA drastically redces the effect of self-noise with several interesting features of CDMA for mobile communications such as fixible freuqncy rese, the capability of performin soft-handover and a lower sensitivity to interference. This paper evaluates the performance of a synchronous CDMA reture link for a Ka-band geostationary satellite communication system. For a fixed satellite channel whose characteristics depend on weather conditions, the signal envelope and phase for this channel is modelled as Gaussian. The bit error and outage probability, and the detection loss due to imperfect chip timing synchronization is analytically evaluated and the system capacity degaradation due to the weather condition is estimated. The two cases consist of the general case in which all users are affected by rain condition, and the worst case in which the reference user is only affected by rain attenuation. the results for two cases of rain condition clearly show that synchronous CDMA eases the power control requirements and has less sensitivity to imperfect power control.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.101-137
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• 2010

This paper defines markets relating to each paid broadcasting service by applying the test method of critical sales loss to the results of survey to the paid service subscribers. The result confirms the existence of a meaningful competitive relationship--in terms of the Competition Law--among all paid broadcasting services included in this study, or at least analog cable broadcasting, digital cable broadcasting, and real time IPTV(Internet Protocol TV) service. This indicates that current regulations which are being applied to cable TV, satellite broadcasting, and IPTV are actually discriminatory. Based on these analysis results, this paper suggests that the main attention for the improvement of regulations should be focused on regulations which are differently applied to different paid service providers. In particular, Article 20 in the Internet Multimedia Broadcasting Law is interpreted as defining the real-time IPTV as an independent market, thereby having leeway to harm fair competition among different paid service providers. Therefore, that article needs to change to give the right of equal access to contents to all the competing paid service providers. Furthermore, to put teeth in the contents equal access rule, most popular pay channels need to be designated as target contents of the rule. As for the market-share limitation regulations, the paper suggests that an upper limit on the market share should be set based on the total number of subscribers of all the competing paid services and the same limit applied to all the competing paid service providers.