• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.110-119
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation of the prostate using intensity distribution and gradient information in MR images. First, active shape model using adaptive intensity profile and multi-resolution technique is used to extract the prostate surface. Second, hole elimination using geometric information is performed to prevent the hole from occurring by converging the surface shape to the local optima. Third, the surface shape with large anatomical variation is corrected by using 2D gradient information. In this case, the corrected surface shape is often represented as rugged shape which is generated by the limited number of vertices. Thus, it is reconstructed by using surface modelling and smoothing. To evaluate our method, we performed the visual inspection, accuracy measures and processing time. For accuracy evaluation, the average distance difference and the overlapping volume ratio between automatic segmentation and manual segmentation by two radiologists are calculated. Experimental results show that the average distance difference was 0.3${\pm}$0.21mm and the overlapping volume ratio was 96.31${\pm}$2.71%. The total processing time of twenty patient data was 16 seconds on average.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.743-767
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• 2020

Due to the impressive flexural performance, enhanced compressive strength and more constrained crack propagation, Fibre-reinforced concrete (FRC) have been widely employed in the construction application. Majority of experimental studies have focused on the seismic behavior of FRC columns. Based on the valid experimental data obtained from the previous studies, the current study has evaluated the seismic response and compressive strength of FRC rectangular columns while following hybrid metaheuristic techniques. Due to the non-linearity of seismic data, Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) has been incorporated with metaheuristic algorithms. 317 different datasets from FRC column tests has been applied as one database in order to determine the most influential factor on the ultimate strengths of FRC rectangular columns subjected to the simulated seismic loading. ANFIS has been used with the incorporation of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic algorithm (GA). For the analysis of the attained results, Extreme learning machine (ELM) as an authentic prediction method has been concurrently used. The variable selection procedure is to choose the most dominant parameters affecting the ultimate strengths of FRC rectangular columns subjected to simulated seismic loading. Accordingly, the results have shown that ANFIS-PSO has successfully predicted the seismic lateral load with R² = 0.857 and 0.902 for the test and train phase, respectively, nominated as the lateral load prediction estimator. On the other hand, in case of compressive strength prediction, ELM is to predict the compressive strength with R² = 0.657 and 0.862 for test and train phase, respectively. The results have shown that the seismic lateral force trend is more predictable than the compressive strength of FRC rectangular columns, in which the best results belong to the lateral force prediction. Compressive strength prediction has illustrated a significant deviation above 40 Mpa which could be related to the considerable non-linearity and possible empirical shortcomings. Finally, employing ANFIS-GA and ANFIS-PSO techniques to evaluate the seismic response of FRC are a promising reliable approach to be replaced for high cost and time-consuming experimental tests.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.30 no.7_8
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• pp.672-680
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• 2003

A shopbot is a software agent whose goal is to maximize buyer´s satisfaction through automatically gathering the price and quality information of goods as well as the services from on-line sellers. In the response to shopbots´ activities, sellers on the Internet need the agents called pricebots that can help them maximize their own profits. In this paper we adopts Q-learning, one of the model-free reinforcement learning methods as a price-setting algorithm of pricebots. A Q-learned agent increases profitability and eliminates the cyclic price wars when compared with the agents using the myoptimal (myopically optimal) pricing strategy Q-teaming needs to select a sequence of state-action fairs for the convergence of Q-teaming. When the uniform random method in selecting state-action pairs is used, the number of accesses to the Q-tables to obtain the optimal Q-values is quite large. Therefore, it is not appropriate for universal on-line learning in a real world environment. This phenomenon occurs because the uniform random selection reflects the uncertainty of exploitation for the optimal policy. In this paper, we propose a Mixed Nonstationary Policy (MNP), which consists of both the auxiliary Markov process and the original Markov process. MNP tries to keep balance of exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning. Our experiment results show that the Q-learning agent using MNP converges to the optimal Q-values about 2.6 time faster than the uniform random selection on the average.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.1-8
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• 2013

In order to evaluate 2 extensive green roof systems(Sedum Box Roof System and Roof-rainwater Utilization System) for urban greening and select ground-cover plants, which can adapt well to the drought tolerance in an extensive green roof system on 12 species. This study was carried out in order to suggest an experimental base in assessment of the Green Roof-rainwater Utilization System and selecting the drought resistance of plants. Adopting the natural drought method, this paper studies the drought resistance of 12 kinds of ground cover plants. The drought-resistance of ground cover plants subjected to dry processing time were evaluated using relative water content on leaves, relative electric conductivity and chlorophyll content in 12 kinds of plants, and the relation between soil water content under drought stress. Drought resistance of the plants were subject to rooftop drought resistance treatments. The result showed that with the increase of stress time, the relative water content and chlorophyll content on leaves were in a downward trend while the relative electric conductivity was in an upward trend. Among the 12 species of ground cover plants, excluding Pulsatilla koreana, Ainsliaea acerifolia was selected for rooftop plants because they showed resistance to drought strongly and took adaptive ability. These results showed that drought tolerance of plants in Roof-rainwater Utilization System were stronger than the Sedum Box Roof System. Therefore, the Roof-rainwater Utilization System is good for plants. It helps them adapt well to the drought tolerance in rooftops and can be used for urban greening.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.9B no.2
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• pp.139-146
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• 2002

The robot soccer simulation game is a dynamic multi-agent environment. In this paper we suggest a new reinforcement learning approach to each agent's dynamic positioning in such dynamic environment. Reinforcement learning is the machine learning in which an agent learns from indirect, delayed reward an optimal policy to choose sequences of actions that produce the greatest cumulative reward. Therefore the reinforcement learning is different from supervised learning in the sense that there is no presentation of input-output pairs as training examples. Furthermore, model-free reinforcement learning algorithms like Q-learning do not require defining or learning any models of the surrounding environment. Nevertheless these algorithms can learn the optimal policy if the agent can visit every state-action pair infinitely. However, the biggest problem of monolithic reinforcement learning is that its straightforward applications do not successfully scale up to more complex environments due to the intractable large space of states. In order to address this problem, we suggest Adaptive Mediation-based Modular Q-Learning (AMMQL) as an improvement of the existing Modular Q-Learning (MQL). While simple modular Q-learning combines the results from each learning module in a fixed way, AMMQL combines them in a more flexible way by assigning different weight to each module according to its contribution to rewards. Therefore in addition to resolving the problem of large state space effectively, AMMQL can show higher adaptability to environmental changes than pure MQL. In this paper we use the AMMQL algorithn as a learning method for dynamic positioning of the robot soccer agent, and implement a robot soccer agent system called Cogitoniks.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.1C
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• pp.26-35
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• 2006

In this paper, an automatic mobile robot system for a intelligent path planning using the detection scheme of the spatial coordinates based on stereo camera is proposed. In the proposed system, face area of a moving person is detected from a left image among the stereo image pairs by using the YCbCr color model and its center coordinates are computed by using the centroid method and then using these data, the stereo camera embedded on the mobile robot can be controlled for tracking the moving target in real-time. Moreover, using the disparity map obtained from the left and right images captured by the tracking-controlled stereo camera system and the perspective transformation between a 3-D scene and an image plane, depth information can be detected. Finally, based-on the analysis of these calculated coordinates, a mobile robot system is derived as a intelligent path planning and a estimation. From some experiments on robot driving with 240 frames of the stereo images, it is analyzed that error ratio between the calculated and measured values of the distance between the mobile robot and the objects, and relative distance between the other objects is found to be very low value of $2.19\%$ and $1.52\%$ on average, respectably.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.59-69
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• 2009

A bi-directional symmetric prediction technique has been developed to improve coding efficiency of B-slice and to reduce the computational complexity required to estimate two motion vectors. On the contrary to the conventional bi-directional mode which encodes both forward and backward motion vectors, it only encodes a single forward motion vector, and the missing backward motion vector is derived in a symmetric way from the forward motion vector using temporal distance between forward/backward reference frames to and from the current B picture. Since the backward motion vector is derived from the forward motion vector, it can halve the computational complexity for motion estimation, and also reduces motion vector data to encode. This technique always derives the backward motion vector from the forward motion vector, however, there are cases when the forward motion vector is better to be derived from the backward motion vector especially in scene changes. In this paper, we generalize the idea of the symmetric coding with forward motion vector coding, and propose a new symmetric coding with backward motion vector coding and adaptive selection between the conventional symmetric mode and the proposed symmetric mode based on rate-distortion optimization.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.55-63
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• 2000

This paper investigated the sub-region compression effect of the three dimensional DCT(3D-DCT) using the difference component(DC) of inter-frame in images. The proposed algorithm are the method that obtain compression effect to divide the information into subband after 3D-DCT, the data appear the type of cubic block(8${\times}$8${\times}$8) in eight difference components per unit. In the frequence domain that transform the eight differential component frames into eight DCT frames with components of both spatial and temporal frequencies of inter-frame, the image data are divided into frame component(8${\times}$8 block) of time-axis direction into 4${\times}$4 sub block in order to effectively obtain compression data because image components are concentrate in corner region with low-frequency of cubic block. Here, using the weight of sub block, we progressed compression ratio as consider to adaptive sub-region of low frequency part. In simulation, we estimated compression ratio, reconstructed image resolution(PSNR) with the simpler image and the complex image contained the higher frequency component. In the result, we could obtain the high compression effect of 30.36dB(average value in the complex-image) and 34.75dB(average value in the simple-image) in compression range of 0.04~0.05bpp.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.143-149
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• 2008

The aim of this study is to suggest the method for image enhancement of digital chest radiograph and evaluate clinically the quality of the resultant image. A nonlinear iterative filter was developed in order to reduce quantum noise preserving edge. Dynamic range was adjusted and adaptive image enhancement was performed based on the property of anatomic region and the degree of compatibility with neighboring pixels. The lung fields were enhanced appropriately to visualize effectively vascular tissue, bronchus and lung tissue with the desired mediastinum enhancement. Clinic evaluation was performed by three radiologists with at least 8 years experience. The anatomic regions of 11 in PA and 9 in Lateral were observed carefully in each 100 radiographs according to ITU (International Telecommunication Union) recommendation 500 protocol. The result showed the mean 3.4 between good and adequate. This means that the clinical utility of the image quality is enough. In this study, image enhancement was carried out considering image display device and human perceptual system to prevent the loss of useful anatomic information. In order to increase the diagnostic accuracy in digital radiograph, the continuous study on image enhancement is needed.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.11B no.3
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• pp.281-288
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• 2004

In order to extract and analyze complex features of the behavior of animals in response to external stimuli such as toxic chemicals, we implemented an adaptive computational method to characterize changes in the behavior of chironomids in response to treatment with the insecticide, diazinon. In this paper, we propose an energy minimization model to extract the features of response behavior of chironomids under toxic treatment, which is applied on the image of velocity vectors. It is based on the improved active contour model and the variations of the energy functional, which are produced by the evolving active contour. The movement tracks of individual chironomid larvae were continuously measured in 0.25 second intervals during the survey period of 4 days before and after the treatment. Velocity on each sample track at 0.25 second intervals was collected in 15-20 minute periods and was subsequently checked to effectively reveal behavioral states of the specimens tested. Active contour was formed around each collection of velocities to gradually evolve to find the optimal boundaries of velocity collections through processes of energy minimization. The active contour which is improved by T. Chan and L. Vese is used in this paper. The energy minimization model effectively revealed characteristic patterns of behavior for the treatment versus no treatment, and identified changes in behavioral states .is the time progressed.