• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.282-293
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• 2005

Sonoelastography is an ultrasound-based technique that visualizes the elastic properties of soft tissues by measuring the tissue motion generated by an externally applied vibration. In this paper. the characteristics of wave generation in soft tissues due to an acoustic vibrator are studied. The effects of modal patterns on the detectability of lesions such as tumors in senoelastography are also investigated These are accomplished by analyzing the vibration patterns calculated using theoretical equations and finite element methods in halt space, infinite plate. and finite-sized tissue. A finite-width source generates shear waves with large amplitude Propagating in specific directions. and the generation characteristics depend both on the width and frequency of the vibrator. as well as the distance from it. It is shown in a finite-sized tissue that the lesion detection in displacement images is quit dependent on the modal patterns inside tissue. In contrast it Is also found that the lesion detectability in strain images is less dependent on the modal Patterns and is much better than that in displacement images.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.41-48
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• 1997

This paper proposes the methods for improving the recognition rate of theARS, especially equipped with the speech recognition capability. Telephone speech, which is the input to the ARS, is usually affected by the announcements from the system, channel noise, and channel distortion, thus directly applying the recognition algorithm developed for clean speech to the noisy telephone speech will bring the significant performance degradation. To cope with this problem, this paper proposes three methods: 1)the accurate detection of the inputting instant of the speech in order to immediately turn off the announcements from the system at that instant, 2)the effective end-point detection of the noisy telephone speech on the basis of Teager energy, and 3)the SDCN-based compensation of the channel distortion. Experiments on speaker-independent, noisy telephone speech reveal that the combination of the above three proposed methods provides great improvements on the recognition rate over the conventional method, showing about 77% in contrast to only 23%.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.328-334
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• 2015

This paper describes an acoustic analysis of a Jing, Korean percussion instrument, according to different drive point and blow strength, and this analysis is focused on the softening and beat phenomena. Three kinds of blow strength (very strong, strong, and weak) and three locations of drive point (center, up, and right) are applied, and the spectrogram function built in Matlab is utilized to analyzing the softening and beat of target sounds. The stronger blow you drive to the center of the Jing, the more clearly softening is observed. Frequency shifting is increased proportionally to the blow strength and frequency and it is stand out on the harmonics in contrast with that of other partials. Beat of the Jing can be classified into the early beat and late beat. The beats by the outside driven Jing are distributed in wider frequency band than the beats by the center driven Jing. In addition, it is observed that the early beat is affected by few specific partials developed around harmonics for the center driven Jing.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.419-425
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• 2022

This paper aims to evaluate the acoustic detection performance for the deployment of the source and receiver positions of a bi-static sonar. In contrast with a mono-static sonar, a bi-static sonar has a large amount of computation and complexity for deployment. Therefore, in this study, we propose an assessment method that reduces the amount of computation while considering the variability of the ocean environment as a method to apply to the placement of the source and receiver of a bi-static sonar. First, we assume the representative ocean environment in the shallow and deep water. The signal excess is calculated with the source to receiver ranges and sensor depths. And the result is compared with the proposed assessment method of acoustic detection performance.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.525-533
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• 2022

We propose an effective method for suppressing both side and grating lobes by applying 2-dimensional Fourier Transform to the received channel data during the receive focusing process of an ultrasound imaging system. When the signal from the image point is focused, the channel signals have the same DC value across the channels. However, even after echoes from outside an imaging point are focused, they are manifested as having different spatial frequencies depending on their incident angles. Therefore, after the receive focusing delay time is applied, 2-D Fourier Transform is performed on the time-channel data to separate the DC component and other frequency components in the spectral domain, and the weighting value is defined using the ratio of the two values. The side lobe and grating lobe were suppressed by multiplying the ultrasound image by a weighting value. Ultrasound images with a frequency of 5 MHz were simulated in a 64-channel linear array. The grating lobe appearing in the ultrasound image was completely removed by applying the proposed method. In addition, the side lobe was reduced and the lateral resolution was greatly increased. Results of computer simulation on a human organ mimicking image show that the proposed method can aid in better lesion diagnosis by increasing the image contrast.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.203-213
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• 2023

In medical ultrasound imaging systems, Side lobes may appear if signals outside the imaging point are not completely removed during receive focusing. If the time signal of the side lobe overlaps with the time signal (main lobe) from the image point, it is difficult to completely remove it using filter processing in the time domain. However, In the receive focusing process, when time-channel signals are Fourier-transformed, the main lobe and side lobe signals are spatially separated in the spectral domain. Therefore, the side lobes can be suppressed by multiplying the image with magnitude weights, which are determined by the magnitudes of the main and side lobes calculated in the spectral domain. In addition, when the main lobe and the side lobe spectrum are adjacent, the distance weight was applied based on the distance between them. In a 5 MHz ultrasound imaging system using a 64-channel linear transducer, point reflector and speckle images with cysts of various brightness were synthesized and weights were applied to the ultrasound image. Using computer simulations, we confirmed that the side lobes were greatly reduced without affecting the spatial resolution in the point reflector image, and the contrast was significantly improved in the cyst image with computer simulations.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.120-125
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• 2015

With rapid urbanization, the volume of traffic in urban area has been significantly increased. This in turn led to problem which can be described as Road Traffic Noise. Currently, to alleviate the road traffic noise damage, a demand for installation of soundproofing walls is rising. Among different shapes of soundproof walls being installed, the reflection-type acoustical insulation panel is highly drawing attentions of residents due to the fact that it does not obstruct their field of vision in contrast with the opaque acoustical insulation panel. On the other hand, improving the soundproofing wall of the reflection-type acoustical insulation barrier panel needs to be focused on since it has a possibility to cause a secondary damage by reflected sounds. Therefore, in this research, study has been carried out to improve the forms in order to minimize travelling of reflected sounds through changing the frontal surface shape and geometrical shape of the reflection-type soundproofing panel. A result from comparison between the normal reflection-type soundproofing panel and the improved soundproofing panel, with reduction effects in the noise reflection, showed that the curved type of soundproofing panel has an impact on reducing the noise up to 1.5 dB. Furthermore, from the research conducted, it appears that the increase and decrease in the reflected sounds can be changeable depending on various design factors. Thus, it turns out that the study shows a potential possibility to develop a reduction technology of the reflected sounds pertaining to overall condition on the soundproofing walls.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.271-281
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• 2005

An electromagnetic type shock wave generator suitable for extracorporeal shock wave therapy has been constructed by employing a solenoid coil. The Property of the shock waves produced by the shock wave generator was evaluated using a needle hydrophone. It was shown that, as the capacitor discharging voltage increased from 8 to 18 kV, the Positive Peak Pressure (P+) of the shock wave increased non-linearly from 10 to 77 Wa. In contrast. the negative peak Pressure (f) varied between -3.2 and -6.8 MPa. had its absolute maximum of -6.9 ma at 14 kV The peak amplitudes P+ measured repeatedly under the same voltage setting varied within $5\;\%$ from mean values and this is very small compared to about $50\;\%$ for electrohydraulic type shock wave generators. It could be observed, from the hydrophone signal recorded over 1 ms. several sequential acoustic impulses representing bubble collapses. namely. acoustic cavitation. induced by the shock wave. A technique based on wavelet transformation was used to accurately measure the time delay between the 1st and 2nd collapse known to be closely related to the shock strength. It was observed that the measured time delay increased almost linearly from 120 to $700\;{\mu}s$ with the shock wave Pressure P+ increasing from 10 to 77 MPa.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.573-584
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• 2012

Breast and prostate tumors or cancers tend to be stiffer than the surrounding normal tissue. However, the difference in echogenicity between cancerous and normal tissues is not clearly distinguishable in ultrasound B-mode imaging. Thus, imaging the stiffness contrast between the two different tissue types helps to diagnose lesions quantitatively, and such a method of imaging the elasticity of human tissue is termed ultrasound elasticity imaging. Recently, elasticity imaging has become an effective complementary diagnostic modality along with ultrasound B-mode imaging. This paper presents various elasticity imaging methods that have been reported up to now and describes their characteristics and principles of operation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.392-400
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose an effective speech reinforcement technique base on ITU-T G.729A CS-ACELP codec under the near-end background noise environments. In general, since the intelligibility of the far-end speech for the near-end listener is significantly reduced under near-end noise environments, we require a far-end speech reinforcement approach to avoid this phenomena. In contrast to the conventional speech reinforcement algorithm, we reinforce the excitation signal of the codec's parameters received from the far-end speech signal based on the G.729A speech codec under various background noise environments. Specifically, we first estimate the excitation signal of ambient noise at the near-end through the encoder of the G.729A speech codec, reinforcing the excitation signal of the far-end speech transmitted from the far-end. we specially propose a novel approach to directly reinforce the excitation signal of far-end speech signal based on the decoder of the G.729A. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by the CCR (Comparison Category Rating) test of the method for subjective determination of transmission quality in ITU-T P.800 under various noise environments and shows better performances compared with conventional SNR Recovery methods.